The drops of rain fall from miles above and swim through the air, buffeted and caressed by the wind before bouncing, sticking, splattering against the glass. Each grabs its own spot, running upward even against the now-forward momentum before it joins with another and yet another, becoming more, and running toward the edge, toward the end,. To be free and fly again. As each drop is absorbed into the larger, a windshield wiper arcs, and the surface is clear for another thousand moments.

The bus slowed and sighed to a stop where she waited, and she smiled to the driver through the windshield before the door opened. He had been driving this route as long as she’d been riding it, and they went to the same church together every week. They chitchatted as she made her way slow and painfully up the steps, with her chin out and a smile on her face.

- Evenin’ Mrs. Waterman, he beamed at her.

- Evenin’ Mr. Brown. God bless you. She shook her umbrella out and looked for a place to sit. The bus was crowded tonight. There were some young men standing even, in the back. She spied one empty seat, a few rows down and gratefully moved to claim it. Next to her sat a young white man, somewhere in his late twenties, she supposed. He was dressed well, and dry, and he sat reading a paperback book. He looked up as she settled her tired bones, and made movements as if he could offer her some more room. He smiled warmly.

- Good evenin’, Ma’am. His eyes were soft and comforting in some way, and she
found herself relaxing almost involuntarily in his greeting. He put his book down and continued to smile, and they small-talked as the bus drove on through the rain. In the twenty or so minutes they rode together, they talked and laughed and he told her about himself. He told her his name and said he attended the University at the far end of the bus line. He had just moved to town and had served in the Armed Forces a few years ago.

- Oh my husband was in the Army! In the Big War! She exclaimed. Such a nice boy, and handsome. Mrs. Waterman had never had any sons, but this boy would have made a good one. He had been in the Last War, he told her, and she tried to remember which that had been. The memory really wasn’t that sharp any more. He laughed and told her it was okay, that no one really remembered it. He was so polite! It was over, he said, and nothing had happened to him. He hadn’t been injured, at least, and now he had some money to go to school.

- Well I think it’s wonderful, a young man serving his country! I bet your momma’s real proud. He laughed and looked out at the rain, and soon it was her stop.

He stood up as she got off the bus, and waved to her as the bus drove away.

A cacaphonic rhythm, discordant and eternal. The slow hiss of a hundred streams and a thousand frying eggs. It is infinite fingertips on tightly stretched skin, loud and hollow each. A symphony without a single string or wood or horn. It is tension, stress and conflict and cerebral massage, each beat an artillery shell, just a little bit closer. The largest drops are direct hits. The concussion leaves you standing.

The urge to run from the shelter to the bus was almost irresistible, even with the huge, heavy umbrella she carried. The gutters were a mad rush of city refuse, and the water almost reached the first step as she pulled herself in. Mr. Brown offered a hand and his evening greeting.

- Mrs. Waterman? That you under all that wet?

- Yessir. God Bless but its blowin’ out there. You keep your eyes to the road now, Mr. Brown. His chuckle warmed her as she shook herself off. The crowd on the bus was even thicker tonight. The same group of kids was standing around at the back, talking too loud and cursing everything. Looking like trouble. They had girls with them and the things coming out of their mouths were as painful as needles in her ears. She was tired and felt a bit short of breath, and she dropped into the first empty seat she found with a sigh of relief. She was doubly pleased when she saw that she was sitting next to her companion from the night before. He had been staring out the window, but now he turned and smiled and right before his features adopted that endearing, drawing glow they had affected previously, she thought she saw . . . something. But it was gone now, and she felt like earth drying slowly in the sun as he tipped his head at her.

- Evenin, Ma’am. What a pleasure! How was your day? And she related the highs and lows of her day at the hospital. She slipped into a moment or two of staff gossip, but realized he wouldn’t be interested in that and told him a joke she had heard instead. He laughed a virile, healthy laugh and patted her on the hand. She stared at him as he did, and felt a flush like . . . nostalgia. The warmth she had always felt around a charming young man, a twitching of the toes and a sudden inclination to rub her own face. The pleasant, content memories of a lifetime of desires and sensual pleasures.

And yet what was it she had seen in him for that instant before he turned himself on? It was a desert. Desolate space. Whispering winds and swirling sands. A face like genocide. How do you lie wounded at the base of a mountain, and achieve the summit in the space of a glance?

As if he were listening to her thoughts, his conversation changed gears. He had been talking about missing his folks, and walking his German shepherd in the park, but
now blue eyes dimmed a bit and the laugh lines slowly hid themselves.

- Can I ask you a question, Ma’am? His smile never wavered, but his gaze seemed to burn her eyes some now. She tried to brighten up and told him to ask her anything.

- Have you ever noticed that no one smiles much as they ride the bus? You ever see the look on everyone’s face here as they ride home from work? Aside from you and me, of course. And his voice was sad as he said this, and his own smile was weak, and it was her stop. They said goodnight, and she got off, barely hearing Mr. Brown as she thought about what he had said. She walked home with pictures of the faces she had been riding with for years spinning in her mind. Tired faces. Old faces. Poor, broken down, beat up, held down losing faces. Black faces. People that hated the city. Hated their jobs, their spouses, their families. Old women with bad backs and dead husbands, emptying bedpans and giving enemas until the day they died, working to afford their cheap apartments in bad neighborhoods. God Bless.

You feel the tap of a raindrop. Long before it has soaked into your clothes you feel it tap you. Before one has evaporated you feel them all assault you. Mist can be a cool torture, anthill-staked. Merciless. The medium sized-drops are the ones to catch on your tongue. Taste the factory down the street where your father baked. Your coat keeps you dry from the large ones, but you can feel this whole world of droplets waiting outside, aching to know you. A standing silhouette of water, facing away from the wind.

She did run tonight. The umbrella was useless in this wind. She had an image of opening her big, green umbrella and being pulled directly down the street, toward the river. Flying down the sidewalk like a horizontal Mary Poppins. She would have laughed out loud, but she was afraid she’d drown. She ran through a wall of water
swirling all around her toward the safety of the bus. Mr. Brown was on his feet to help her inside.

It was dark on the bus, the only light in the world coming from the weak fluorescent tubes. The streetlights were gone, kidnapped. Smothered by the storm. She was definitely short of breath and cold, although she was sweating from her struggle with the weather. She breathed deep, and the bus air was warm and dank, and smelled of people’s breath and moist, rotting second-hand clothes. Mr. Brown moved off slowly, his nose to the windshield trying desperately to find some road.

And there was her seat again, next to her young man. Why did no one else sit with him? The bus was as crowded as ever, and he sat alone. While people stood. She had seen plenty of other white people riding, and someone always sat with them. Usually. Though they weren’t as well dressed as this one. Or nearly as friendly, come to think of it.

He was smiling at her. He was smiling. She sat and he turned it on, but as she looked into his laughing eyes, she was as cold, as miserable as she had ever been, and her back throbbed with the bus engine. He tried to chat but he soon fell quiet, watching her almost bemusedly. Waiting.

- I want to ask you about what you said last night, she said to him. He nodded and leaned forward to speak, but he never got to answer her because there was a noise up front, and she hadn’t noticed they had stopped and someone was leaning over Mr. Brown striking him with something. A man stood up and came down the aisle and she couldn’t see Mr. Brown slumped over in his seat. This man was huge and had madness in his eyes and blood on his shirt and saliva at the corners of his mouth and he held up his hand. A gun. Oh Lord Jesus! Oh my Lord Jesus she couldn’t breathe.

- Don’t nobody move! Nobody move! I’ll blow your head off! I’ll blow your Gotdamn head off! The man waved the gun around and began pointing it at people.

-You! You! You! And, oh Jesus he was turning toward her and the gun was turning her way and there was a blur and the young man . . . her young man . . . was rushing past her and grabbing the man and the gun and pushing him back, toward the front of the bus. He was much smaller than the crazy man, but he moved so fast and he pushed the man back in less than an instant and she still hadn’t breathed and he had the man back and bent backwards over the fare box. He held the man’s wrist with one hand, pointing the gun away and it went off twice, shattering the windshield but she didn’t hear it. She was watching her young man bend the crazy man’s head back with his other hand and lean over the man’s throat and take it in his own mouth. Time stood still and she felt her head growing light as she watched the young man bite down hard, three times, each time leaning in closer, getting deeper and shaking his head back and forth. The red came forth less like a geyser and more like a subtle surging of the tide and the sound . . . the unforgettable sound ... tearing and wet soft tissue and the issuing forth of a badly led life. And the young man stood and the dead man dropped heavy and her riding companion walked slowly out the door into the rain. At last she let out a gust of air and regret and breathed deeply, shaking, while her world revolved.

The red cloud forms in fits. The red drips. Tries to assume an ill-fated form and is whisked away, down the block, down the rusty drain. Runs down and mixes with the rip-tide of the city sewer system and it’s gone.

Richard R. DiPirro is a writer, a husband, and a father who works and lives in Savannah, Georgia. Richard has been published in several magazines, including Calliope and Fiction Reader, and in the online journals Fringe and Raving Dove. He was the winner of the 2000 Lillian Spencer Award for Fiction and the Jones Scholarship at Armstrong Atlantic State University and was most recently the second place winner of the 2008 Baltimore Review Short Fiction Contest. Richard and his wife are anxiously awaiting the arrival of their third child in December.