17 Southbound
The pavement was cool. And the warm breeze beat against it. She felt like she could walk forever, and she considered it. Freedom was so vibrant that day that her independence swelled with its own ego. She walked past her stop. A determined bus slowing then speeding again in a hurried succession to its next stop forgetting her immediately. But the breath left behind in the tailwind of its ghost embraced her. At the next corner, a young Italian girl and her beautiful bronze friend. As she approached their path, she felt ashamed of her own filth and disregard for sin. She felt their energy, young, innocent, full of faith and grounded in hope and destined for true love. And then the pretty one lit a cigarette. And the Italian girl giggled. And she pulled from her purse a bottle of booze wrapped in a brown bag. They scurried off like a secret. And for some reason the story she had told herself shattered, but she loved them even more. Fighting to live the best that they can: she understood that. At the turn, a pigeon sat thinking. His smooth grey head turning to look and to eavesdrop or check the next crumb. She hadn’t seen a pigeon in the city for years. There’d been conspiracy tales told of the long lost feathered beast, in fact. She remembered a boy she once knew who’d told her that all birds are robots. She made eye contact with the specimen as she turned onto Porter but couldn’t process those thoughts. So she let them go, and she hustled to catch the next bus.