Bus

Somehow the call had never been made and Mandy--JR--had sat irritably in a corner of the bus station before standing up, walking across the long dully reflecting linoleum, and beating the small bald man with a newspaper. It was a Metro daily; a surge of NY loyalty stole across her and she stepped up the pace on the whacks simply out of outrage to have a sub par periodical as a weapon. Cheap ink formed erratic reverse text of the day's news story; a few moments more, and blood began to fleck across the re-print stories on the man's head and face.

No one's attention was aroused. A small boy, at the age where the top of the head comes just below the hip and there is unnoticed spittle from the lips, watched from over the top of his booth. The child's possible brother, at the age between hip and shoulder but no drool, joined him, but the sheer repetitiveness of her whacking was upended by the creaking and then slam of a newspaper stand door.

Mandy, too, was bored by her work, or really, the preemption of her work as there had been no call, and considered that all train stations, even this hovel in Oklahoma, were but reflections of Port Authority. If one could but suspend beneath the eyelids the movement from station/holding cell to another, all bus stations would seem a part of a subterranean network composed solely of electric lighting and linoleum.

She paused, wondering at that underground world partially created by her head, wondering if it was created by her head, or the underlying class distinction. She wiped her forehead, and sat down across the booth table from the corpse. There was few better ways to draw attention away from a corpse than to sit down next to it as a companion. To be fair, the bald man, despite the checkering of newsprint articles and blood across his broad fat head, might not have been dead. Mandy did not check his pulse or breath; it was in her style to be thorough, but beating the old man was more reflex than job. She knew, irritably gazing at the clock and wondering if Oklahoma was EST, that she would be compensated for her travels and there might even be some apology for the miscommunication. Knowing that, however, did not alleviate her from the moment, the series of moments, the monstrous miniature of eternity that now, that was the present of the bus station.

The drooling hip-height child passed, curious about the newspaper whackings, but not overly excited.