Needs a lot of work, I know. Feel free to shred. PG 13 for violence.
Shards
PROLOGUE
STIX AND STONES

[nix]

"We're going to drown." He says, "Take my hand. Up, we need to breathe."
"What do you mean, we?" she says, and pulls.

[and nothing happens, and nothing happens]

It will be a red sky. You won't see it directly; but with your glances nip at the salted, boned cuts of it in the river, the puddles, the rear view mirror skirting the driver's perspex fortress. You'll have no mind to butcher it yourself.

You will be settled on the sidesaddle seats by the front. You will like to think that this is not an act of selfishness, (taking the seats reserved for the disabled and elderly) but out of a deeper chivalry; insuring that no one is behind you so that were there a hostile intruder you'd be able to defend your fellow passengers strategically without being taken by surprise. You'll kid no one.

A citrus veneer will take the edge of the musk of the seat itself. You won't successfully distinguish which was once the seat's original hide, and which the patches. One of the million minute myriads of defeat mortality picks from our proud bones.

The marinade of intimate human excretions sinks deeper into the leather. A few of the fruits its juice lurked within reveal themselves:
Bare legs baked, crossed coyly, salaciously seeping.
Neck laid out of itchy suit lolling, pores drooling.
Honeygrime and scabs of blood-bonds scraped off smaller hands on the corner liberated of its padding.
On a hot day this cocktail stench blossoms, but this is not one of them.

You'll want to bite down on the seat and suck and chew and chew and gnaw; your eyes rolling back ecstatically, your chewed mangled nails bear-trap tight into the padding.

Whether it will be repressed tendencies competitive (of the defeat), carnivorous (the leather), or sexual (the sweat) that perverts you is as much as mystery as the order of patches, but it little matters unless you decide you must act upon such urges and find yourself needing to explain yourself. This is unlikely. If you will, however, perhaps the true cause will not help your case.

Shortly, you might arrange a remark about the sky. You won't associate with Those Other People On the Bus without provocation. You used to subscribe to the "Excuse me, may I sit here?" refrain, but it has been hacked down to a sound akin to an unmilked cow. You'll hope, absentmindedly, it was imbued with a bovine tenderness this time.

Moo-ove over.

[touché]


The lengthy leviathan will hum, chuff, opens wide. A woman will flurry in, all bags and no balance. She'll extract a note from a protruding lettuce.
The driver will grunt.
It will out like unsettled effervescence. "I know, I know, I'm sorry. I just, I've been shopping and I got it cash out thinking I'd need that much for the rest of the week, I never manage to get to an ATM otherwise, and then I was going to break it at the butchers but the butchers was closed, and- None of this is your problem, gosh. I can wait for the next one if you like-"
A faint yowling will ensue from her backmound of progeny.
The driver shall smile beneath his coarse coverlet of stubble,"Settle down, love."
"No, you put up with people all-"
"It's fine. Look. Wait 'till the others get by, they may have something."
The line will burst past her in a caterpillar bunch, whisking their tickets thought the cycloptic machine, their schedules impairing their peripheral peripheral consciences. (Windows to the soul, indeed, and double bolted).
"I can give it to you in coins, I guess." The driver will sigh.
"That's fine, I can always do with more shrapnel"
He'll heap the gold into her hands, the ticket lining her palm beneath, cupping his own about them until she's steady. "You right love?"
His touch will be cold, bony, nobbled at the knuckles, half a gnarled thumb misplaced in motor mishaps. A network of cracked crevasses and crevices interlace; porous, raw, prawn-red and bug-eyed vein blue. A sweet touch, an abiding touch, firm at the center and thorny deep.

An obscene naivety will drop her mouth in soft release, contort her brow, laden labour upon her breath as if in orgasm. "Do you know I've been married sixteen years. I've never been touched like that."

He'll not hear it through the swish of the closing door.

She'll be embarrassed.

They'll wait for one another,
settle for sleep,
but receive neither.


[Bereaved/Bye Baby Bunting]

You will go to make an observation about the Touched Woman to One of Those Others, but then you realise they are in little position to judge. There will be a clearly disturbed man who has fashioned himself an armour of cereal boxes, and a young woman who lies down, and seems to be sleeping with her eyes open. This could very well be the wrong bus. Doubt will drop the floor beneath you, but then again, you've never noticed the Other Passengers before. Perhaps it will be you, who is the changeling.

The clearly disturbed man will have worn a hole into the cheek of his Cornflakes helmet, rubbing it against a paler portion of the seat's leather.

The Touched Woman's Backmound Of Progeny will clamber down and start humming in the felted fuzz of child-song.

"I have missed my stop," Clearly Disturbed Man will mutter, "But these things are usually on some kind of loop. Not too late, but too early."

Greed will seethe, and he'll tie the strings of his stares to the Backmound with extravagant double bows. They will be like the bows with which her mother braces her shoes, the shoes too big to accommodate growth, the knots too tight to make up for it.

[Harmless]

Those automatic rubber-webbed lips will admit another, given pause. The man to be admitted will be reassuringly mundane.

"Red sky," The Touched Woman will say.
"Yes. Sailor's delight." Clearly Disturbed Man.
"Is it though? I thought that was for night?"
"Isn't it night?"
"No." she'll lose certainty, "I don't think so. Morning, isn't it? Sailor's warning then."

They're mad, you think. But which is it? Now you don't know, morning or night.

"Well, is that east, or west where the sun is?" he'll say
"I can't see the sun, it's behind the horizon."
"Was it before?"
"I don't know. I wasn't watching. I don't think I have the time to just watch the sun go by." she'll gain the self-righteousness reserved for those repopulating the planet.
"Where is east?"
"Where the sun comes up."
"Why that's useful."

The Reassuringly Mundane Man will have piled his coins on top of one another, in sorted towers.
The Driver will shake his head, "This is New Zealand currency. You need double this."
"I don't have any more than this."
The Driver will sigh, "I suppose I can accept you as a half fare."
"Thank you. So much. I'll pay you back tomorrow I swear."
"Which half?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Which half?"
The Mundane Man will giggle in staccato, "Funny, that."
"Do you want to go or not? Half of you, or none at all."
The Mundane Man will leak weeping.
The Driver will nod, "You. Hold him still"
You'll glance to each.
The Clearly Disturbed Man will glare, "Don't look at me, pal, I went last time." He will thrust your hand to the paler leather he had been caressing. Much paler leather. Much much softer. "We missed our stop. The ticket didn't cover any distance after that. Rather than have me a half fare she took the whole. But she is beautiful, isn't she? Even the pieces of her reused, you can see. You can see, can't you? She was just... she was the seeds of something else. She wasn't late, she was early. Just too early, that's all. Premature."
The Backmound will sit cross legged in the aisle, "He's new. You're new, aren't you? Look, I'll do it, I'll show you." She'll take a chocolate coin from her lap and shoves it in her mouth, foil and all. With fat-cheeked scorch she'll take her anthropomorphized inanimate animal beside, "Teddy that was naughty of you eating up your money. Now you are far too fat, and you cannot pay your fare." She will thrust its head out the window. And Smack! The telephone pole will decapitate it to the child's delirious delight.
The Driver will wink at the girl.

Of course you will never commit such an atrocity. You wonder at the Mundane Man not trying to escape. Quite pitiful really.
"We're late as it is." The Touched Woman will amble up the aisle, and restrain the Mundane Man, extending limb by limb out of the window while the Driver's eye draws the line of her thigh.
The Mundane Man will scream. Smack! Smack! Smack! Down the aisle on his slippery stumps, but he'll quieten up, so you'll not notice him so much.

It will be at this time, that the Young Woman Sleeping With Her Eyes Open rolls over, and her notebook will fall to the floor.
Everyone will seem to hold their breath, then their lips will flutter in breathless lullaby. Fetid desperation.

You'll notice the Young Woman's eyes are closed, but her eyelids are clear, with fine feathery tufts of translucent hair. You'll recall this trait in waterbirds. Two sets of lids, one for swimming, one for sleep. But the woman will hardly swimming...

"She's beautiful." The Backmound will sigh.
"She is, isn't She?" The Touched Woman will sigh also, the petals of their sighs overlapping.

But she won't be, the woman, not what you would call beautiful. Not at all.

"She is our writer. She made you. And me. She makes everything you say and do, and she loves you very very much. But we mustn't even think about Her, She doesn't like that. We have to play by Her Rules, don't we now? Pay our fare." Touched Woman will say.

The Mundane Man is sobbing.

"Mama, why is he sad."
"He's new, he's not used to Her. Sometimes She must do strange things to us, as She's making us. She's always making us. See how She watches us, that means she's writing you all down. But sometimes there's too much of you, or you aren't as special as you might be, and that's why we have Half Fares."
"Like Teddy?"
"Like Teddy."
"If she loves Teddy why would she do it to him?Why would she make me do it to Teddy if it makes me sad?"
"Just as we are bound to Her, and Her fate, She's bound to someone else, she must entertain them. A Reader. They like us to be hurt, it amuses them. They are bored when we are happy."
"Meanie."
"I know, darling."
The Backmound will look up at you. You'll smile. So much of being a parent is theatrical, you'll think.
"Mama, look! It's me!"
"I know it's you, darling."
"No. On the book. One their book."

You'll look down. Your book.

There will be a hush.

"The Reader," The Mundane Man will say softly.

It will be the wrong bus, that morning.

You'll blurt "I'm not the only one. It's.. printed. There are millions."
"Then we won't miss one, will we?" The Clearly Disturbed Man will muse.
"This is not my bus"
"Then you'll not have the right ticket... will you now?" He'll rasp.

[smack]
**********************************

Hahah. I hate you, and your beautiful metaphors. I really loved this line,

and you know it turned me on, ooooh baby baby.

:heartbeat: Pat