Ask Me Again Tomorrow (Lick the Knife)

An old man staggers onto the bus. He is tall and walks as if he is actually a midget balanced on the shoulders of another midget hidden within the folds of his coat. He has dark skin and a full white beard and wears a floppy black hat. He looks like Uncle Remus, or a reject from a Flan O’Connor fable. He stiffly lowers himself onto the seat next to me. He smells like a mixture of cologne and smoke; not cigarette smoke, or wood smoke, but the smoke of something that wasn't meant to burn but did anyways. It takes a minute before I realize that he doesn’t smell of smoke at all but of ash.   

*

Two young guys get on within a stop of each other and start yelling to each other loudly across the aisle.“How’s things going with whatserface, that chick from Digger’s?” the first asks.“Chelsea? Get this. She's moving to Kenya to work at this baby elephant orphanage. She says her job is to sleep cuddled up right next to the baby elephants so they don't die of sadness. Can you fucking believe that? I mean, with all the problems in the world today and she’s worried about baby elephants being sad? How fucking selfish is that?”
“That’s fucked up. She was pretty hot, though. Dude, this is our stop. Pull the thing.”

*

When the two kids get up, the old man leans forward and asks the porcelain-faced redhead in the seat in front of him what she's reading. She plucks out an earplug and says, "What?"
“I said, what’s that you're reading?”
She flashes him the book cover. “Harry Potter.”
“Oh, that’s garbage.” He shakes his head theatrically. “That’s absolute garbage. You shouldn’t be reading that. Hey, let me ask you something. You twenty-one?”
She nods.
“Good, then I can talk to you.”
“You talked to me before.” The girl has a high-pitched yet scratchy voice, not at all what I imagined.
“Oh yeah? What did we talk about?”
“You drove a cab in Phoenix.”
The man rasps with laughter. “That’s right, ’83 to ’85. What stop you getting off at?”

*
 
I pull the yellow cord and step off the bus and stand on the corner, waiting for the traffic signal to change. I notice a girl crouching in the storefront window of the yarn store, painting the fake walls white with a stubby roller. Milky plastic crinkles at her feet. It looks as if she is on display in some aquarium or zoo. She has an ass like a bird, an ink black ponytail, brown socks bunched up around her ankles. Her shoelaces are untied. I look down to make sure that mine are not before I cross the street.

*

I cut through the city park, which has for a month now been filled with tents and tarps and homemade shelters of the protesters. Cardboard signs jut out everywhere like tombstones in a colonial graveyard, Sharpied with slogans like We Are the 99% and Two Parties No Voice, and one that reads Keep Shopping Everything is Under Control. A kid is twisting and pinching balloons into animals while a crowd of kids in hoodies and a couple of bike cops watch. A pit bull pants at his owner’s feet beneath a bench. When I get to work, there is a message there from a friend saying her second youngest son was shot to death by a federal agent in a McDonald's in Honolulu at three o’clock this morning. I can’t believe my baby’s gone, she writes. To think I was dancing last night. I’ll never dance again. How can I go on.

And the day, the day, the day, stretches its claws but does not pounce, satisfied to gnaw on the thing it has already got trapped between its paws.