We Don't Make The Papers

The old lady does not want to be helped up. She glares through her thickset glasses and her daughter, now over forty, looks embarrassed. The girl sitting nearest, also embarrassed, springs up and disappears. There is a stray, unaccountable note of reproof in the air, and the bus, like any red-handed child, finds the shortest way to a flamboyant, casual exit.

Bringing up the rear are seven gentlemen, of average height. Their average, that is. One appears to be asleep, even through the frequent and violent sternutations of his companion. The third, also stern, glares at the clearly drugged boy on his left while the two nearest the window giggle at nearly everything, but the man with the briefcase doesn't mind at all.

Having the faculties of perception and imagination rather keen and muddled in her, the girl knows that this, this is how she was to live. Writing these histories of no consequence; warming up to the world's invisible things. The man next to her, also elderly, clutches his yellow bag under the sagging, now asleep, chin. He has on an iron grey suit, black tie and socks, with a vest of a between shade. He may be dreaming of school.

Exchanging frequent winks with most of his female passengers' reflections, hanging by a wrist, is the conductor. An amber traffic light does to him what red purportedly does to decorative bulls in Spain. The driver hurls out abuses at his lustful racking of the bus's haunches, but secretly decides to keep him.

Of the several thousand people one saw everyday, she remembered only the unlikely. The ones she loved, also the most unlikely, were not apt to get along. The girl realised all of this, of course, but thought only of the sun on her left that sped out of sight.