Flash fiction: passenger
Being a vidulante commuter with a tendency to stalk fellow passngers started at the same time as other things. I wouldn’t say they were coincidental. The cracks in the plaster has turned into sagging, balding spots that leaked cold water onto my head while I showered. Headlines in the Daily Murmur about human tragedy and the gaping imbalances of society seemed to me to be bolded up and printed in a bigger font than before. Big enough that I’d read them and pick them up to scan the stories at least.
It’s reasonable to get pissed off if you’re sitting in a silent room and all you can hear is a tap dripping. But would you know it was still doing it if you moved rooms? Next door, upstairs, in the garden? Even if I took the bus to the local supermarket I can hear the rhythm of the drops at the roundabout by the trolley park at the edge of the canal where the kids dump them in instead.
Like a faulty aertex ceiling I find human suffering just as impossible to switch off to even if the steady drip, drip, drip of despair is in a distant continent, not my living room.
I did doubt this occasionally. The increasing frequency of parties, gatherings – in fact, noisy social interaction involving more than one person and a TV screen – made any kind of contemplative meditation impossible in the rented kingdom I called my home. The shared areas were a Goya etching, natural disaster in microcosm and testament that if you don’t adhere to a well-planned rota, pestilence and disease are the only logical outcomes.
That and creating a desire to change the world through a mixture of idealistic hope, brutal justice and noticing the guy who got on before I did at West Reason.
