SLIDE

 

Who was she?

 

Who was this woman in the everyday, slack-jawed freefall through life?

 

She sat across from me on the number 28 bus on the crawl down grubby inner city streets that were shifted thin by carelessly parked vehicles on both sides. Close to my neck of the woods.

 

She sat in her fuzzy seat with her head in her right hand, her left arm slung across the back of her seat. She looked crestfallen and a bit irritated, which was odd. Weren’t fat people supposed to be perpetually jolly? Wasn’t that why Santa Clause was always so cheerful?

 

The size of her was awe-inspiring, yet terrifying.

 

As the bus roll-bumped along its scheduled way, I guesstimated her weight to be no less than a quarter-ton. Her skin was bunched at every visible joint and was an off, mottled color.

 

Beached whale tint.

 

The bus moved and the passengers waited and the gargantuan woman’s back fat echoed the bus’s progress. Shallow waves of flesh rippled across my line of sight, hypnotizing me with their regular seismic progress.

 

The woman sighed, stared at nothing.

 

I smiled in horror.

Reviews

[Jonathan Escoffery]

This is hilarious in a disturbing kind of way. I always think your going to go one way with your stories,(left or right maybe) and then you go the Hawksmoor way.(Straight up) Your descriptive writing is flawless. I especially love how the back fat indicates the bus's progress. Not sure if this is a prose poem or a story, but I enjoyed it. Even if it is kinda mean-spirited. -Esco

[W. Braid Anderson]

A colossal effort!

[Tony Murray]

Nice Story. I have had similar bus rides in my day. Good to see the good are still writing. I momentarily traded my pen in for a helmet and shoulder pads but i promise a winter return.

[Satine]

Damn fine piece of writing. There is no beginning, middle, end nor plot. It's a vivid snapshot of a moment in time so well described that I'm right there with you taking it in...feeling pity perhaps, certainly curiosity about how this woman came to this place in her life. The part that works for me the most would be this;

"As the bus roll-bumped along its scheduled way, I guesstimated her weight to be no less than a quarter-ton. Her skin was bunched at every visible joint and was an off, mottled color.

Beached whale tint.

The bus moved and the passengers waited and the gargantuan woman's back fat echoed the bus's progress. Shallow waves of flesh rippled across my line of sight, hypnotizing me with their regular seismic progress.

The woman sighed, stared at nothing."

Though I stumbled over the word "guesstimated" as it seemed to be too cutsey a word for the tone here.

Finally, this line "The woman sighed, stared at nothing." I think should be the final line as oppposed to
"I smiled in horror." And perhaps in the present-tense? "The woman sighed, staring at nothing". This way you leave the poem perhaps saddened but without passing any sort of judgement...just a thought.