beginning of an attempt at a short story

She hated buses. The grunting shifts, the slimy squeak of sliding doors, the wires with too many fingerprints, pulling, snagging, yanking down for stops. Trains had a smoothness that soothed. It was always that the bus, hesitating, jerking and yet without restraints, made her sick. The train lulled and mocked her worry over schedules by propelling her into sleep. But trains had their own unpleasantness. They conjured memories of a boy who’d vanished in New York.

The bus seats were furred in blue, the bus dotted with yellow poles and a broken red dial at the front that flashed pieces of street names. To her it seemed to be winking with the knowledge of its uselessness. The weight in her pocket was a cold shuffle of tokens and coins. She took one out and felt it warm in her palm. She wondered at its little silver and gold face, its antiquity. It did not seem to belong in her hot hands in a world of crossed satellite signals and people blinking at their lovers on screens, smiling across oceans without even marveling. Where did it? She’d watched a video of the New York subway when it first opened, 1910, a grainy trolley shuttling through a shaky corridor, and the people in tall hats gathering around it on the platform; in the film they seemed to scuttle whole yards at once; there was no blurring, only bouncing from one spot to the next. Tokens belonged then, where they’d begun. 

The city moved around her; the bus made a westward trajectory, leaping past storefronts and gutters in gulps between stops. Louise studied the brown water under the Chestnut Street bridge as they slid over it; the river was wide and dark; despite the sun it was little more than a muddy, eddied mirror. Whatever its depths were, she couldn’t guess—though she’d swam in it once, in the summer, years ago, miles from here. Where the water was clearer. 

The bus was grinding to a stop (having carved a route past the columns of the train station and dozens of blocks of students roaming, coughing, laughing) and she rose, feeling the heft of inertia on her body as the force pulled her backward, resisting the tires’ insistence. A pause as she let herself hang from the pole, one-handed grip and then the pavement under her feet and the bus trundling on. She looked up and began to walk, taking buildings’ eaves as cues. Maps irritated her; they were a tangle of red nets cast over dotted lines. They meant nothing but squinting. And she’d rather find her own way than pore over paper.

She walked. She looked at each person passing her, studying, seizing their faces with her gaze, wanting to know who they were and why. Then a snag: a face she knew—though changed, blurred—but still the same. She stopped, a name stuck to her tongue. It cartwheeled out before she could check its progress with a second thought: “Esther?”

The face slid toward the sound, a flitting of pupils and a quick tightening in the lips, the brows quizzical but softly so. Esther’s hair clouded around her head like bronze floss, looped in sunstorm whorls, a nest. Some kind of corona. And the eyes, green and too wide, like a lizard’s or a seer’s, two round bulbs stuck in shallow sockets. Louise had not seen Esther since high school. 

“Oh hey… Louise. What’s up?” Esther’s words were woozy—looped syllables that fumbled against each other, a slow churn of noises. Louise noticed, now, the delicate spindles of red crawling up Esther’s eyeballs like bloody webs. The yellowness in them. The dull flush of her mouth. 

“Not much. How’re you?”

“I’m fine.” Esther squinted in the sun.

“I haven’t seen you in a while. Do you still live in Virginia?”

“No…” Esther paused, watching the sidewalk. “I moved back a few months ago. What about you?” She looked at Louise closely now, peering, and Louise felt herself flinching, an itch to run, to measure her safety by the blocks she could put between herself and this question. What about her? What about the time since she’d left school that had elapsed in leaps and skips, bouncing from one season to the next without any remembered indication of the blurred days in the middle? What could she say for the time and herself, except that they were both silent, marred, lost? She spent Saturday afternoons counting the oily fingerprints on bus wires on the way to the only place she felt uninterrupted. How often she wished she could stop heaving distance between herself and living, life, the present tense; instead she craved the solace of memory, of dissected pasts and the untangled lines of lives that were complete.

“Oh, I’ve been back here for a while, I guess.” Louise thought she might choke. She found an excuse to get away within the close of five more minutes of stilted exchange, thinking that in Esther’s eyes was an accusation—or a wily triumph. They were both fallen, then; Esther’s half smile, uncoiling, seemed to wink. 

Finding the gate and sliding it open, Louise followed the gravel path to the nook of stream where a birch shot white limbs skyward. She sat, cautious, cross-legged, on the grass. “I’m sorry, Mom.” She said it aloud, but hadn’t meant to. There was no one around—the place was as noiseless as any city niche could hope to be; it contained just a rustling, and somewhere far off, a hum. But she was late, and startled still by her encounter with Esther, and the silence breathed taut and eerie around her.