Microstories

I’ve been reading stories to friends of late. They all enjoy the stories where someone is about to die. I suppose it makes sense this fascination with our ephemerality. I too am fascinated by an ant or a spider in the moment before I wipe them clean. The stories that I love now are more mundane. I like to read stories about people standing in front of a dryer, waiting for the clothes to dry and for another emergency to appear, perhaps a child crying, the dishwasher finishing, or a sandwich that needs to be made. Somewhere I’m needed.

I keep waiting for the bus to come. Nearby, law students are passing the time by talking about job offers. They speak quickly and articulately. I want to invite them back to my house for a drink. I think with the proper amount of whiskey we could all forget about tort law and the interning policies of the DOJ. Soon enough we’ll all be naked, and it would be clear that underneath our clothes and patterns of speech, we are all very, very different beings. It was the clothes that made us feel temporarily alike. Divested of them, we stand awkwardly in the living room, wishing we were in court, arguing for the right to be anywhere but here.

In a fit of whimsy I decide to call her. I tell her that I’m sorry for the drawing that I’d done of her that had turned out so poor. “What picture?” she asked, swishing a glass of Merlot around. Confirming, once again some simple knowledge that you just know Socrates and Plato must have had, that no one cares as much about you as you. It was no doubt pithier when they said it, and I’m sure it sounds better in the original Greek. The sun was shining, olives ripening, and various birds were flattering themselves in song. Whoever it was, Archimedes or Plato, no matter how hard he tried, could not have imagined me, sitting on this old bus, trying to remember the name of the philosopher who swore that all was water in order to pass the time.

All of the buses say not in service. They are shells, empty metaphors, one imagines them rolling through the city, picking up no one, sufficient unto themselves, almost prayerful, these empty vessels. A nut hatch flies above me, perching on the slender branch of a tree, turning his head and thinking whatever it is that birds think before lifting off into the sky. These empty buses are a waste, like young people who are not in love. Imagine them, staring out windows at the coast or the slivers of slender light all caught up in the branches of trees, with no one to write letters to. The only happy people in this city are the bus drivers, winding their way through the streets and grids, passing everyone on the corners and leaving behind them a trail of disappointment. I followed them out last week into dusk. They made a  line at the airport, all these empty buses and the drivers all stepped out and stood in the warm evening air, smoking cigarettes, talking of the women, the night clubs, the early morning, not worrying about the lives they’d left behind, but the lives they are leading.