1. I am suddenly gripped by an uncontrollable urge to lay my head in the crook of the neck of the boy sitting next to me on the rattling bus. We sit in those sideways seats like waiting room couches and gaze out the window at the squinting peach lake. His neck is achingly vanilla and smooth. I want to lick it, suck at the wafery skin, nibble the goose bumps. It�s not that I have some thing for kissing strangers on city buses or anything like that. I don�t even really want to kiss him at all. His lips, when I peer surreptitiously at them, are kind of repulsive really; peeling like layers of onionskins. He himself is not even really that cute. At least, his profile is knobby and strange in the high-contrast early evening. Still. I feel that if somehow, I don�t want to freak him out or anything, only it seems to me if I could get my lips and cheeks up close to where his neck and shoulders form a smooth hammock, his navy blue corduroy collar would smell like wood smoke and his soap, and everything else would somehow slip away. The urge heightens and I am afraid I will actually do it. Like when I�m at the edge of a precipice or lake and something twitches within me, and even though I try to keep my muscles coiled tightly I am sure that at any moment I might actually jump.

 

2. My neighbor struggles with her umbrella in the windy street. I watch from my window. I do not once consider leaving my apartment to help her. It would seem strange and she would wonder why I had gone to the trouble and for weeks afterwards every time we saw each other there would be a strange tension. Her umbrella flings itself inside-out, like a dying fish on the shore. Her hair is black and straight. She is composed of shadows from this height, through the rain-streaked pane. She is like the city, grey and vague and cold. A man across the street waits with his dripping dog under the dry cleaners�awning. He is watching her. When the umbrella finally breaks free and the wind whips it down the alley he flinches but does not say anything to her. She, I think, looking at her starlet stiletto heels, is somebody�s child.

 

3. I am waiting for my bus, shifting my weight from one leg to another and hoping I don�t look uncomfortable or uncertain. To look as if I were uncomfortable would be certain death. Women with long legs would swoop around and devour me whole. There are three other people waiting for the bus. We all think of the bus as our own personal bus. I wait with the same three people every day and we do not say things to each other. One woman drops off her toddling child at the YMCA every morning before the sun has fully undressed. I see her later, downtown, and she looks different, criss-crossed by the lazy shadows of skyscrapers. Maybe I look different too. She never looks at me. I wonder if the people she works with know about her toddling child. She is very young. She is almost a child herself. This morning there is a fourth person, who paces in between the bus stop sign and the newspaper machines. He does not mean to, but he is highly disruptive of our usual morning routine and he is making us all nervous. He is very tall. His limbs are heavy and he does not move them unless he has too. He wears a tattered overcoat and mumbles to himself as he paces. Fuck her, he mumbles. Fuck that old bitch. I wish somehow that I could make things okay for him. He has slept hunched over in an awning and emits the stench of alcohol. The bus comes down the street and everyone shuffles into position. Hey, he says to me, hey, you got some change for me for the bus. Hey, he says, I really need to get on this bus. It is easy to pretend I do not realize he is talking to me, and to climb the bus steps. I fall asleep on the bus ride and dream that I hear a strangled cry which keeps repeating.