Humor/Satire / Traipsing in Time

Traipsing in Time

The light turned green. In the moment of hesitation before the taxi driver touched the pedal to go, his passenger raked the door handle and pushed his way out the yawning mouth to his feet and into the crowd on the sidewalk. Laughing at his own boyish honesty, Paul found himself hoping the driver would notice the ten dollar bill he’d left on the seat. If not, fuck ‘im, he thought. If he doesn’t bother to look if I’ve forgotten some valuables…
Appraising the shifting crowd, he shivered at the destinies sparkling about him, vectors in the fog of eternity masked by fixed jaws, whitened lips, eyes locked straight ahead. He drummed the ground in an easy step, guarding his lack of determination with a mock-angry brow, tight, drawn together, teeth bumping together not quite a grind. His steps scrubbed at the gum, dotted everywhere, a spotty path, evidence of passing waves, tidal waste dropped from the mouths of DNA-infested hoards.
At the top of a staircase across the street, a small crowd gathered and laughed, stirring in circles and turning to mourn, for a while, the loss of the sun which had recently slithered behind some clouds, kissing their tenderness, flaunting his fading luminescence for the tiny gathering below, actors and camera men, producers, director. The commercial would have to wait a minute or two until, soothed by a reprieve into obscurity, the sun emerged from behind the curtain, zipped up from his love play, and returned for the day’s excesses.
Paul balanced his options and leaned toward a left turn, pausing only once to avoid colliding with a wheelchair exploding out a doorway marked girls girls girls. It was a rotational step he took to avoid the foot stops at the front of the chair, a turn which left his eyes resting on a woman crossing at the light, brunette with stains of light gathering in her ringlet curls.

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