The Minotauress

followed him, after, of course, the arduous task of asking the behemoth next to him to get up so he could squeeze by. The woman's walrus face fixed on him; she had a Big Dipper of moles on her forehead.

'I saw you writin' that dirty shit on the seat,' mouthed the walrus-faced woman. Green pistachio-mush was caked between her inordinately large teeth.

'It's Wilhelm Leibniz,' the Writer replied. 'Pluralistic objective monadism.'

When he tightrope-walked by, the driver said, 'I thought you were going to Lexington,' but the man pronounced the word as 'Rexington.' He was Asian-American.

'I've experienced a creative advent, a new variance of my Muse has arrived,' the Writer replied. 'And, I'm sorry to point out, your bus is too fetid.'

The driver's slanted eyes looked cruxed. 'Fetid?'

Someone from the seats cut in, 'He means your bus stinks!'

'Oh... '

Next, a passenger with a more distinct voice appended, 'Yes, it smells like B.O. mixed with the smell of dried apricots. You know, that uncanny way you taste the smell right as you're eating one? The sapor?'

The Writer stared back as if into a glittering chasm. The person who'd made the simile was a gaunt-faced man with spectacles and a slight malocclusion of the jaw. He looked about as happy to be on the bus as the Writer had been.

Thank you, sir! the Writer thought and hopped off the bus.

The Greyhound tore off in a deafening roar mere seconds after the door had flapped closed behind him. The Writer felt siphoned within a dervish of dust and noise; a final glance at the bus showed him a smear of faces, like apparitions, inducing him to recall Ezra Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro.' Like petals on a wet, black bough...  The old man who'd gotten off with him fell down from the roaring vacuum drag.

The Writer helped him up. 'Are you all right, sir?'

'Blammed dink driver!' the old man railed. 'Bet'cha he was VC, I shorely do! Wants to get back at us fer blowin' his shit country up'n that Ho Chi Minh fucker!'

'Actually I think he was Japanese, but then... we blew their country up too.'

The old man waved an irate fist in the air. 'And I just had me some Hin-doo doctor at the hospital in Pulaski tell me I gots some blammed disease called dye-ur-beetees.'

'Oh, sorry to hear that. Type 1 or 2?'

A cockeyed glare. 'How the fuck do I know? I tolt ya, the fucker was Hin-doo, could barely understand his swami jabberin'... . A'course, maybe he wasn't Hin-doo on account he didn't have one'a them dots on his head. What's that make him, then? A fuckin' A-rab?'

'I'm sure I don't know, sir.'

'And looky there!' the old man continued pitching his fit. 'I'se in a swivet, I am!' He pulled up a pant leg to show a swollen ankle purple as an eggplant skin.

Ew, the Writer thought.

'Swami fucker says I ain't got no cirkalayshun no more on account'a this dye-ur-beetees ‘so's if I wanna live, I gots to have my fuckin' feet cut off! And ya knows what else? Says I gots ta pay him to do it! Eight hunnert bucks, and the fucker had the balls ta tell me that's the poverty discount!'

The Writer's heart went out to the old man...

Rheumy eyes peered back below bushy white brows. 'You ain't from ‘round these parts, are ya, boy?'

'No, sir. I'm from—' but then the Writer faltered. I'm the man who came from nowhere, he answered in thought. He picked a random city in his head. 'I'm from Milwaukee.'

The old man tensed. 'Same place that fella in the news is from?'

'Pardon me?'

'It's been on the blasted news the last three days straight!'

I've been on a Greyhound bus for the last three days straight...  'I hadn't heard. Something happened in Milwaukee?'

'Dang straight. Cops caught some fella with dead bodies in his apartment, had cut-off heads in the fuckin' refrigerator. Said there was even a head in a lobster pot! One'a them homo fellas, probably chugged more cock than I'se chugged moonshine. And he hadda pair'a cut-off hands hangin' in his closet.'

'How... macabre... '

Now the old man seemed to give the Writer a disapproving once-over. 'What's a city boy like you doin' here?'

'I'm following my Muse, I guess you could say.'

'The hail?'

'I'm a speculative novelist,' the Writer said. 'I infuse relatable modern fiction scenarios with charactorial demonstrations of the existential condition. Allegorical symbology, it's called, rooted in various philosophical systems.'

The old man smirked. 'Fuck.' Next, the rheumy eyes shot down to the Writer's sneakered feet. 'Where'd ya git them shitty shoes, boy? K-Mart?'

The Writer was surprised. 'Actually, yes.'

'Well, they look like shit, son, and if you're a writer then you must have money—'

The Writer laughed.