citynight

in the late hours we slide slowly past ourselves

Cigarettes burn red against nightshade glass, their tired faces sinking back slowly into long shadows broken only by breath. Ribbons of fog snake between hands and lips, holding them in a condensation of suspended silence, now driven off with the shake of a glowing ember. Here and again smoke rises from empty mouths; the tobacco smells of the forest, old evergreens cast in the darkest hues, the slightest hint of old fires held deep in their ancient trunks. It spirals through the fog, pockets of dry heat twisting once and twice into that cool mist, then breaks into bits against the turbulent night.

Bright lights pierce the clouds that have settled around us, and, disturbed from our repose, we turn away. The cigarettes bob in response, a choreographed dance of flame alight with silent melody. The bus slides to a stop in front of the shelter; they are extinguished; we shuffle into the fluorescent cavity. Seats fill sparsely, and eyes avoid eyes. We lurch forward.

Here and there, while they watch, we become ourselves. Here, a woman, her face drawn and somber, mutters softly to herself, now reproaching, now apologetic. She seems to realize something, and she relaxes, subdued. Like the end of a wellworn record, her voice falters, then trails off; the static hum of the engine fills the space between us. There, lovers sit lost in a daydream, without looking, without seeing. They stare, one this way, the other that, beyond the rusted metal roof and past each other. But their knees knock together; that is all; that is enough. We carve ourselves from one another, encroached upon from the outside, thankfully. A man begins to speak now, to them, to us, too loud and too bright, and we crash together inescapably all at once.

The street shimmers through a soft haze, incomprehensibly far from the halfdark glow of the bar. Dull music thrums from inside; a disembodied laugh and a few whispered words float over the evening, and ice melts in his lukewarm hands. He waits below the neon sign, face brushing softly against the damp breeze, and stares into the dusk. Before him people pass through that sharp fluorescence, eyes momentarily ablaze before falling back into shadow, continuing onward. The music changes now, slow and sultry, and the bass vibrates the still air almost to a boil. For a moment, it rings clear, the door briefly ajar as someone too slips out into the night; it swings back, and feeling recedes with the music, again.

The hour strikes: out of habit he makes his way home. People begin to filter out of bars, spilling out lazily into the puddles of amber streetlamps. Unconsciously, they move as a group, pulsing with the tide of the evening, flowing freely to fill the spaces left by sudden departures. He pushes through them gently, without hurry, and listens to voices draped with liquor and somnolence. They speak only of the night, though in all too many words, and the smell of burning matches.

Between dim rowhouses and warm storefront facades that flicker off one by one, the city blurs itself before him, softening its sharp edges into glass pools that echo and do not reflect. Streets pass into one another, a procession of dark ivy crawling across windbeaten stone, and the people too. He wishes to be alone tonight, to hold a flame up to a mirror and to see nothing at all; but by candlelight everything sounds wrong: sound sinks into shadows that aren’t there, and a hole yawns where the moon should be. Soon the light wavers; fails; tired and weary, he sits. He is offered a smoke, but he shakes his head. 

At last, he rises from his redfaded seat, the alcohol spinning slowly in his brown eyes. We see it before he does, the realization and the dawning emerging in whispers and glances. Now, he lets a small smile slip, like it’s a joke: that the bus is northbound when he should be going south, that’s all. Home slides further from him; and with a motion neither urgent nor careless, he reaches across the row, and pulls the yellow cord draped across the fogged windows.

The bus shutters to a stop, and the doors slide open with a hydraulic hiss. The night swallows him with a sigh.