“Monday morning. Bus stop. Santa Monica. Approximately eleven in the morning.”

by Michael Cooke

A woman appears at this bus stop in Santa Monica. She’s thin and unkempt, dressed in an open unzipped medium grey sweat jacket. The two laces at the neck of her coat poke through their eyelets longer than they should, like two thick grey strands of straggled hair gone lost. She wears formless loose-fitting thin cotton pants that hold no shape, also grey colored. The pant legs are so short they miss meeting the cuff break of her indistinct sports sneakers by a good three inches. She sports a grey cap, a shade darker than her jacket. It does good work in what appears to be keeping a healthy head of light grey hair tucked away securely. Renegade strands of runaway hairs hang in compliment to her two jacket laces. She has a grey bag she temporarily places onto the blue metal bus stop seat. She pulls out her cellphone and calls someone up. The dialogue overheard is a detailed report about a man whose origin is from a particular nearby country who she claims entered her physical space disturbing her. Her voice incrementally rising, she elaborates about her suspected belief that the man wishes her to be incarcerated. She believes he is the one who should be incarcerated. She further details the reason he wants her incarcerated is so that he can steal her bag from her. All this jabber includes ludicrous references to the ethnic origins of a former president. She punctuates her talk with sumptuous amounts of expletives and repeated slurs in the attempt to prove some logical connection to the man at the receiving end that only she exclusively appears to make any sense of. She continues her tirade concerning the man, stating to him she’s had enough. And again repeats her conviction that the man she refers to is the one who should be incarcerated, not her. Her conversation is interrupted because…

The bus arrives. It is one of those long accordion buses, its destination eastward to midtown LA on its way to downtown.

The woman, having concluded her call, boards the bus and marches to its rear. She finds a spot on the back seat. Following her is the individual reporting this account. He spots two available empty seats at the middle of the bus, and heads towards them. He observes sitting in the forward seat a young black man dressed in a black hoodie. To the young man’s side in the seat next to him lays a black backpack. The young man also holds in his hands the straps that connect to a black canvas bag. This observer, upon approaching the seat behind the young man described, hesitates a moment, pausing in the aisle before sitting down. Something’s not right. His hesitation is prompted by the certain feeling the young man before him is troubled in some way. With that intimidating feeling he considers crossing to the other side of the bus aisle to another available seat. But before he makes the slightest move, the young man grabs onto to his backpack and with split second speed shoots up from his seat like a rocket. And in one deft move worthy of a martial arts master, his head lowered like a boxer hunched over in a crunch, somehow attempts to make himself, with his hoodie assisting, appear somehow to be invisible as he with lightening fast execution delivers a direct hit with his backpack into the solar plexus of the man currently typing. With the swing of his bag the young man hits his victim squarely in the gut. There was enough weight of whatever the contents were in the bag to induce the receiver of the hit to blurt out an audible yet muffled grunt from not alone the impact of the strike itself but the shock of having been suddenly and unexpectedly physically attacked. The assailant just as lightening fast as the blow he’d just delivered sweeps up his backpack, throws it over his back makes a beeline for the back seat of the bus as if he’d never laid eyes on the victim he’d just assaulted. – Though the assault was appalling in its action, it did not harm or wound to any degree the reporter beyond that of the shock and alarm of its unexpected strike. Of that fact the reporter chose to completely ignore the punch and its assailant altogether. And instead remained where he was and sat down in the seat behind where the young man had been sitting.

A few stops later a large homeless man got on the bus carrying a large carry-on bag with a handlebar. He fumbled his way near the back of the bus, found an empty horizontal bench seat, propped his bag to the side then plopped himself onto the seat. Loud enough to be heard by all the passengers, he muttered something unintelligible, then ceased muttering anything afterward.

Woman in Pink Shirt Standing on Train by Chang Hsien on Unsplash

Two stops before the finish of this journey a wiry young man in his mid-twenties with ratty long black hair and messy filthy looking beard boarded the bus. With aggressive determination he headed for a place to sit near the back. Two seats behind the exit door he slipped into an empty space by the window. He began laughing intermittently. At first it was thought he was laughing with someone on his cell. But there was no cellphone. He indulged in his laughter for a few moments then abruptly dropped the laughing altogether. He did this several times. Then no longer did he laugh at all. Of that very brief time gap he went completely quiet. Then suddenly he became excitedly charged. And what before was a laugh now emanated into a relentless ongoing cackle. The pulse of his cackle took on an animated irritability so audibly piercing as to disturb anyone on the bus: in particular the entire middle to back section where the accordion part divides the front from the back. Then the wiry young man added to his solo. He punctuated his cackle with a growing and insistent sound impossible to describe. This extra clanging had a horn-like staccato blare to it that took on a demonic sibilance. Its discordance called up the visceral reaction of the proverbial fingernails being scratched on a blackboard. But this particular sniggle was amplified a thousand times more in its fright of attack.

His destination nearing, the person communicating this account rose from his seat to stand face forward in the gateway box of the rear exit door in wait for the bus to reach the next corner. With no one having rung the slack-slung yellow band to alert the bus driver to stop, he turned to his immediate right to pull on the cord. Most unintentionally and unfortunately his eyes met that of the young man’s. This became all the more disturbing since the glare of his eyes bore directly into those of the reporter. His lunatic gaze and hideous expression cackling insanely were so diabolical as to call up the image from the grave an apparition of Rasputin, more devilish and deranged than the original. The bus pulled into the stop to discharge and take on passengers. The two forward doors opened while the rear door remained securely closed. Two voices shouted out to the driver to “open the back door”, one voiced from a seated passenger and the other from the correspondent himself. The driver heard the shouts and the back doors of the bus opened. The reporter exited the bus onto the unshakeable concrete sidewalk to an ascending full and glorious brilliant mid-day sun.