“Bright Open Black”
The following short story from So in Never, So in Dusk is available in print via the Fiction tab on this website.
A city bus with three people on it lumbered quietly along its route on a Minneapolis Wednesday night. There were three people on the bus—a woman in her mid-20s, a man in his early 20s wearing headphones and a Twins shirt, and the driver. It was summer and the rescinding light melded with the coming on of the downtown lights, the steady blaring of the interior bus lights creating a cocoon from this spectacular birthing of evening. The long, worn bus creaked occasionally and the engine provided a comfortable sound to the two passengers. The man could see the back of the woman’s head—long brown hair—but tried not to linger too long on her because of a fear of making her feel uncomfortable. She probably has a nice strong man waiting for her at home with a kiss and some soft, kind words or a glass of wine. The man sighed, but not heavily enough for her to notice. It will be something I’ll never understand, he thought, riding the bus alone as a woman. He wondered at the terror or fear involved with the need to walk quickly when alone at night. Any woman alone could have such feelings downtown. He just didn’t know how or to what degree the feelings were strong. He was young so felt he understood what women wanted based on his small sphere of experiences. She wants a certain thing that I don’t have, he thought. But as he thought about this unnamed thing, he noticed the lithe angle of the woman’s head, the straight brown hair, and a profile of pale mauve lips, a white nose and thick black lashes visible against the blue backdrop of the bus seat in front of her. It was in this moment that the man felt that he might be wrong and that he felt something he did not understand. The bus lurched over bumps in the road and it was night.
The lights outside the bus were brighter and more distant.
The man turned to look out the window, a serene look on his face, as though he had just learned something only possible to learn in the quiet moments when one is alone. Idly his thoughts drifted to some leftovers in the fridge at home where he would soon be.
When the woman had gotten on the bus she had noticed a decent looking guy a little younger than her sitting towards the back. She had been working all day at a retail store, Macy’s or some equivalent place, and was glad to sit undisturbed on the bus, mostly alone. For a few moments she could feel the younger man’s gaze on the back of her head. It would be an obvious thing for him to do, seeing as she was the only other passenger. She hoped he wouldn’t look too long, but didn’t want to turn her head so that he would mistake that as interest. Although, it wouldn’t be a bad place to meet a guy, she thought off-handedly as she folded her hands in her lap. He was at least mildly handsome and she hadn’t been able find anyone going on eight months. Perhaps she would ask him for his number to give her ex an excuse to try to stop him from texting her. But she wouldn’t do it. He would probably think her weird, and besides, he probably had a girl waiting at home with a joke and a kiss. So she looked past the bus window, pulling her fashionable brown paisley jacket up closer around herself, her thoughts drifting into what she might do with her friends this weekend.
The guy was starting to fall asleep because he didn’t have anything in particular to think about, and although he had not worked today, it had been a long day for him. He cooked at a restaurant close to downtown, making burgers and chicken sandwiches, mostly. Tomorrow he would have to work until the kitchen closed. He met all sorts of people at this bar he worked at but they always seemed to be lost or else missing something. He had been working there for two and a half years now and still couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Maybe it was where it was located. It wasn’t quite downtown, and didn’t have any neighborhood to call its own, really. Perhaps people that came in didn’t really know where else to go. As far as the cooking went, it was still difficult but he had gotten used to it. The only thing he regretted about doing it was that he might have been doing something easier or better-paying had he finished school. In dismay he thought about his schooling and let out a heavy sigh, audible by the woman.
She was thinking about her ex boyfriend and how much of a cockroach the man was. They had met in college and he had flitted around the outskirts of a relationship with him for at least a year before fully committing to it. Not really much to her surprise, he had been cheating on her with some sorority dupe about halfway through their year tenure together. At first she denied it, clung, despaired, then hoped, gathered her things together and kicked him out. She smiled a bit and looked down as she thought about that day. But now she was alone again and knew the creeping need for some kind of companionship would cause her to seek out another, hopefully different type of guy. That stuff they put on job resumes about work history, she thought, maybe I could just take the one I have for my dating history and just rip it up and move to New York. Of course it wasn’t possible, not because she didn’t have the courage, but because she secretly didn’t want it.
The guy sitting back behind in the bus had only just stopped playing guitar in folk bands.
She thought, no, no I don’t want to go to New York, I have a friend there that said it was kind of a shitty thing, no I don’t want to be in a relationship right now, unless of course another guy comes along that is a knockout, but wait, no, that’s how I’ve always done it before, and damn it, I’m alone, and I have my friends, and I’ll never meet the guy sitting behind me, but at least he’s not staring at me, and good Christ if I need a cigarette, maybe I’ll go to the movies by myself, but shit, that was where I met my ex, he won’t be there, but damn it I’m alone.
She glanced back at him. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, looking out towards the front window, but not directly at it—in some space close to it, contemplating something. She wondered what he’d been thinking about, and suddenly wanted to ask him what he had been doing all day, but he might find it ridiculous and boring.
He watched her fitfully finger a cigarette withdrawn from the midst of her purse and did not notice the final sharpening of shadows in the night’s official declaration of itself. There was nothing, he thought, that he possessed that the woman could possibly want. He didn’t even smoke, and his peaceful thoughts he had earlier vaporized into a mist like the beginning of an autumn rain. His birthday was in the fall, and he found he could easily be diverted into memory, into dreaming. He didn’t want her to look at him then.
Her stop was upcoming, and she thought that perhaps getting off the bus would change her thinking and distract her as she walked the few blocks to her Uptown apartment. As she lit the cigarette in the echo of the bus’s fumes, an old man entered, hardly noticed, onto the bus.
The man with the Twins shirt, falling slightly asleep, half saw an intelligent, tightly drawn smile on an old man’s face, a picture to end the night with, the brown eyes bright and open and black in between the folds of the deepening night. A kind of wisdom overcame the bus and the young man wondered what he’d done yesterday. Nothing shocked him on the way home, and there, he fell into a dreamless sleep, unaware of filling bar rooms and half-drunk lipstick stained wine glasses in some other part of the universe.