Greyhound
Day Seven of Thirty Days of Writing

Blithe raises her sun shades past her forehead, pulling back greasy black hair, until they come to rest on the top of her head like a headband. Her face is scarred from pock marks. Her mouth is wide and beams when she smiles, it seems to expand the width of her face, bright as a search light. She smiles so big. She smiles so wide. She laughs incessantly, the kind of snicker a witch or hissing snake might make. It’s infectious, forcing a grin from any daring to come too close.
Check this out, she says
Joan is mesmerized by the Adonis Alexander as he bends over to retrieve her fallen coin purse. Such a muscular exterior has never entered the frame of her vision. It ripples in the sun like heated sand and ocean waves. She can’t help but gaze longingly, secretly imagining Jean, her faithful companion, beneath that-
This is absurd. I laugh.
Blithe waves around the piece of pink romance like a pair of freshly stolen underwear, its flimsy cover creased, its image all too expected, a busty blonde woman swooning in the muscular arms of some shirtless Fabio.
Sure it’s ridiculous, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.
I dunno, those books are all the same to me, so genre specific, so predictable. The language they use, those buzzwords like throbbing and quivering, kinda kills it for me.
How does one write sex without it sounding cliché? Without it creeping into the alleyway of shock and awe, yank and shake, if you know what I mean?
She stares out the window, searches through her overflowing bag, opens her paperback, bends the front cover back, reads and reads, closes it abruptly, stares out the window, glances all around, back into her bag, back into the book. She’s wearing a neon pink tank-top, it falls low down her chest, deep cleavage, caramel colored skin. She laughs. Her laugh draws me in, okay, why not.
I stepped on the bus to Saint Louis and walked down the aisle wondering who I might spend the next four hours with. I was hoping for an empty window seat to read in solitude. No such luck. Chose instead the aisle seat beside a smiling, young woman with bug eye shades.
Hello –hello, that was all at first. Then she began laughing manically and I knew I had fallen into a vortex. She kept trying to sell me i-tune gift cards at first, which should have been a sign.
I’m kind of on the run, she says. Have you ever heard of the dark net?
Like the Silk Road? I ask, she grins. Not a bad place to deal drugs, amongst other things.
Notes on Blithe:
How to sear the numbers off credit cards
Generating fake PIN numbers
Counterfeit traveler’s checks
Duck Duck Go
Deceiving casinos
Fire Onion
She was afraid some Russians were looking for her. I was half convinced she was making this all up.
The countryside rolls past. Long filed fields. Sullen silos. Ruined barns. Stacks of hay.
I’ve always wanted to live in the country, she says. I’ve seen them, the farmers, on a hot day, dropping off the hay, and when the day gets too long, they just leave them there. I always wondered what life might be like in the prairie. Lonely. Solitude. The sky, the incredible sky riddled with fiery stars…
A grandmother snaps at her rambunctious grandchildren bouncing around the seats behind us, crowing various threats of punishment. A mother is fast asleep. An old woman is fuck all and dying for a cigarette. The man in front of us is cooing the woman beside him. Have you been listening to him, Blithe asks, he’s a piece of shit! He sounds to me like he’s selling something.
It’s a full ride, and this bus goes coast to coast. She tells me that she’s headed to Nevada. A bus ride from NYC to Las Vegas, her home town. That makes stl a kind of pit stop, I guess.
She has secrets. Shifty eyes. A crooked smile. A slight twist of fear as if remembering where she were returning to — but that’s at least another forty hours away.
It’s never too late to start again, I tell her.
Part of me is curious, part of me wants to follow her all the way to that ridiculous city.
I can see it, she says, it’s your city, look, out the window, in the distance, it’s that arch thing.
Indeed, there it is, gleaning in the sun. I’m almost home… home, I think, is that what this place is? I’m excited, there is still hope.
I smoke a cigarette with Blithe. Be safe. Good luck. Good bye.
I walk to the metro, then walk to the bus, then walk to the house. Welcome home.
