7.02.2025

Avoiding the company of others. Not all others but this lady smells like old world rot. Swaddled like a baby in thick blankets she stands in the direct sun like she's too proud for shade. On the bus the stench is legendary. I remove myself to the last row and it all gathers back there with nowhere else to go. A cloud of microbacteria on the hunt for another biome to colonize. I wave my hands in front of me to ward them off but they're wilier than that and now I'm trying not to choke and holding my breath at the same time and the wobbling and jerking of the bus on brakes that stick and wooden dowels affixed at both ends with wagon wheels. The driver has to stop every few seconds but not for passengers. Birds flit down in front, ruts in the road have to be eased into like we're fording a goddamn river and the air circulation is just active enough to remind you that there are new smells evolving from the old ones, mingling, forming supersmells, becoming semisolid, multicolored and phase shifting and that looks like a torso now and if we're lucky there won't be a head with a mouth that wants to ask us how our day is going.