Fiction by Sean Ruane

Stumble-bus
by Sean Ruane

Stumbling bus-wise, stretching obliquely; diffracted through the bottom of a stolen beer glass, swilling the world, the moon, tripping over the dead-leaf-dropped minutes of past midnight, wearing the devil's creases in yesterday's pants; slowly, quietly, loudly, the world steadies itself against a building and stops; a swirling color wheel mocks in every possible hue and slowly spins to a stop, revealing a crude shape peaking around the corners of a brilliant Technicolor laughter; the front of a bus emerges, a diesel spattered gin and chthonic conduit, beaming a bright horn and shining terrible sounds.

Ahh, the amniotic safety of the bus!

I writhe down the narrow aisle, head first, a breach birth in reverse, falling into an empty seat, sitting among the scraped-knuckled espousers of flat earth ontologies and morning breath that keeps no time, eyeballs big as buttons, campaigning for some profligate bliss; faces all bent into the grimaces of the drowning, clutcher-atters of straw lifeguards, coughers-up of corpsegas and cobwebs, drought slobberers; halloo, gentlemen, it is me again, friends---back to steep in the reek of spilt dreams and dirty arse; back for another airless walk through secondhand smoke and dead hope; I peer through the roiling-wretchedness that hides cracked faces and allows but a glimpse of those sly, jaundiced teeth; I dodge the squinty-eyed soliloquies of pauper kings, the deadtooth swallowed ruminants of maudlin ante-meridian barley-hopped popinjays; you desiccated souls; you post bus-stop-queue-twitchers! Poisoned parsons, sputtering silent sermons and fraught aspersions at pessimistic reflections set in bus glass, half dead, unholy wrecks, strike supplicant's poses for fisted coins---nary a 'howdy-do!'; their bloated pleas pass unheard, muted by broken bus-bulb bombilations and the synesthetic hue of apathetic blazers.

Euphemistic, sack lunched young ladies, a long night's disporting ahead, hoary eyed, smooth thighed, smile fraudly, broadly, and beckon a sticky-seated transition from front to back, up and down, side to side; not a chance, miss, my solstice is nigh, that shortest, dimmest day of my sexual year.

'Relax!' says a cigarette ad.

Good idea.

Sleep.


Author bio:

Sean Ruane lives in Baltimore. He has a degree in experimental psychology and is working on masters degrees in computer science and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. He has been published or has work forthcoming in Juked, Word Riot, Edifice Wrecked, The Flask Review, Mississippi Crow, Boston Literary Magazine (as Axel Finn), and the Houston Literary Review.