Writing about waiting for the bus
Tuesday
After a week of cold rain, a clear still day. In my neighbourhood leaves are falling not one at a time now but in small showers. It is so still you can hear them fall, a patter. They fall with a few bright drops of yesterday's rain.
At the bus stop a young woman in slim jeans and a cropped black jacket. She crouches on her toes and flips through the pack on the ground in front of her. She has little slippers that button across the instep. I see the arch of her foot under the button. Her cropped jacket slides up as she leans forward: I see her bared back, its small, its flare toward hips. Her skin is the colour and smoothness of chocolate gouache, with a long light star just where the root of a wing would be. The suggestion of spine like a rumple in a bedsheet. A little tongue of a tag, long and narrow, pokes out from the dead center of the jeans' waistband. A little lick against the dip of the spine. The tag reads: stretch.
Thursday
A cold, sunny day. I was for a change up before dawn. (Arts Breakfast at 7:30 -- whose idea was that!) The dawn has a crispness and frost-edge that's clean and lovely.
But the day warms up until when I'm out to get the bus, I have my coat over my arm, fresh air sneaking in the buttons, raising goosebumps.
I hurry for the bus, hail the woman already waiting there. She standing with her arms wrapped around herself, in a too-tight bright pink windbreaker. "You're going to work, too," she says.
"Yes."
"Dressed like that," she says. Maybe too many undone buttons? "But I work in a factory," she says. The "but" is a little odd. She's wearing hard-worn jeans, black sneakers, white socks.
"Are you an office worker?" she asks. Shutter comes down between office workers and factory workers, the only two kind of women in the world.
"I'm an artist," I say. Emboldened by the breakfast, I guess. I'm a writer, I could have said, or more usually, I work at the library. But "artist" seems right. I would like to touch this shutter between us.
The bus is coming. I do up a button.
2 Comments
SIGH…
Even your prose is poetry. Wonderful.
Yup. Closely observed but lacking plot.