Traveling Sitting Still (2)

The morning is usually cool and dewy, opening a day's worth of secrets to her while the rest of the exhausted world stirs from their beds and stumbles into their showers. The slowness of the morning, the cool anticipation, reminds her of being young and she usually cries. Just a little. Just in the best kind of way.

Charlie is always nice to her: he helps her onto the bus in the mornings and off the bus in the evenings. He's too young for her—and she's too old for such nonsense—but sometimes she dreams about him. You can't help what you dream, she tells herself in the morning, bracing against her waking arthritis and wiping the night's dust off her photographs—photos taken on the beach at Coney Island, at the lip of Niagara Falls during her honeymoon, or barefoot in the backyard. Friends. Children. Husbands.

"It's not any of my business," Charlie says to her one morning, his empty bus idling patiently while the gray morning lightens toward day, "but I sure am curious why you like riding this bus so much. If you don’t mind the question."

Before she can answer he settles back into the driver's seat and reaches for the metal pull handle that closes the bus doors. People are always doing that these days, asking questions without waiting for the answers. Mona thinks television has something to do with that. Television and all those electronic devices people stick in their ears. That is their way of traveling, she guesses, as if a television show could replace a trip to the African savanna on safari, clutching her father's hand, watching giraffes pirouette above the distant horizon—the unending, molten horizon—listening to the hyenas screaming somewhere safe in the distance.


(Coming in 2007)