The Bus Stop

The bus was late, which was not unusual for the number 11 on a Wednesday, but tonight the cold had a quality that made waiting feel personal, as though the weather had singled her out. Eleanor pulled her scarf higher and watched her breath dissolve into the dark. The shelter was one of the old kind, half glass and half graffiti, and the schedule posted inside bore no relationship to the actual movements of any bus in the city.

The man arrived without sound. One moment the bench was empty beside her; the next, he was there — a thin figure in a coat too large for him, holding a paper bag from which the neck of a bottle did not protrude but which was shaped, unmistakably, around one. He sat at the far end and stared at the road with the particular focus of someone who has decided that if they look hard enough at nothing, nothing will look back.

"The eleven does not run past ten on Wednesdays," Eleanor said, because she had recently decided to become the kind of person who spoke to strangers, and because the silence had begun to feel like a third presence on the bench. The man turned to her slowly, and she saw that his eyes were red but dry, the way eyes get when the crying is finished but the face has not received the news. "I know," he said. "I am not waiting for the bus."