The bus is always late these days, bringing stranger and stranger creatures, when that door rolls open and its metal tongue leaks out.
Cities gather the most everything of them all, don't they. But I suppose you still have to find them. Harder in a city, I've found.
Bus makes it easy.
Ringlets of red hair, boots that still bend at the knee though they go a yard above it, big plastic cases full of instruments or booze or whatever else they could stuff in. Bright orange suits with matte green trousers. Dirty blankets, dirty glasses, cleanest shoes you've ever seen. In wedding gowns, leaking every tear they've ever brewed, coughing up their mother's lung in the winter while beat boxing to themselves, drinking from any container deeper than a dinner plate, so long as it didn't spill it was still good swill.
Who'd own a car in a place like this, when the theater comes to you, from every other corner up 4th street.
Somehow the time rhymed in these moments. Everything just grooved, stopped and went like cogs passing by in some mad man's wristwatch. Perfectly late, as always.