of newspapers, nor in another town, carefully crossing toward my side of the sidewalk. I saw you in a dream, perhaps in plenty of dreams.” A reply almost mirrored her initial confession: “You—I’ve seen you as well. Not as the girl who never rides the bus to school, nor as the one who tended her garden more than she tended herself. I saw you on a portrait hung on the most glamorous space of our house, positioned uprightly on the wall fronting our living room. This might come across as peculiar to say, but I’ve always had admiration for that person on the framed picture, a painting by my father’s grandfather decades before I was born. I can’t believe I’ve found you.” But the two souls know, even with unspoken words, what that implied. But fate has a decision for them. “Mister, I am saddened to say I have woken up from my dreams.” But she wished to say more, but as usual, her words stuck in midair, longing for meaning. In a way like a foul sense of mimicry, the young man replied: “I am also regrettably admitting that I have given away that painting, maybe as for fear you were not real, or that I might continue to believe you were when you were not.” So the lady with her bags full of anything but secrets climbed on the bus that has faced hundreds of towns in its lifetime, and which will continue to meet the same fate until it dies like the star-less night, and the newspaper boy continued the discipline of throwing inked folds of paper from roof to roof, until the routine will have exhausted his creativity and until the chaotic, distortional blur that reeks of pain and lost chances will be forgotten.

joust

VOLUME 1

61