It's likely this is not the bus I expected. Likely, I was expecting b H32 - with the new linolium floor that still sparkles, with the bike rack that you have to tie bikes to. Only likely, due to my noticing their absence as I board. This must be c G33 - where the accordian membrane has torn enough to see out of. I guess fare only gets us so far. We'd have to be community to get any further.
In the tear in the bus that isn't here, I look where the tear would be as I find my seat on the one that is. In the turns, as the accordian flaps in the give the street breathes into every lung onboard by bottoming out their stomachs over potholes, I imagine what rattles the flaps are hands, a festival. People flying in to gather, not to repair the tear so much as care for the bus. I just the hands of the people flying in, just the hands.
Detached by the city, perhaps. Blood drive but its hands. An RV turned med bay parked, under one of the city's pride-and-joy old trees. I imagine donating my hand. How I got my bracelet a year ago and this is my first time lending a hand. How I know the hand will grow back - the bracelets turn bodies all but amphibious to survive this bus ride without air conditioning the way I am. Sebum excreted made more sense, the city - I - found.
And I get to watch the hand get removed - an anesthetic, a psychedelic, and I was good to watch. The tools exquisite, the stump regenerating at its own pace, the sense a part of me would be flying around repairing holes in buses with a mixture of mud and straw all but guaranteed at this point in the operation. The bracelet had been growing nerve endings in the hand and a small heart and a respiration system since day one. This operation is just an opening.
Not that openings aren't everything. Porosity is the world - that this moment could occur from a bus that isn't here in a world that might as well be is enough to hold me to have you, see you, in the seat behind me, the way a moth crawls up the back of the neck, but there's a luna moth that's been crawling all over you all day so it's probably that - probably. That's you, then what. I keep going. Keep imagining you reading this, in place of half-covering the cancelled author fan art stitched to your bag you'll remove, or won't.
The operation finishes, in the RV. I ask if i can watch until the wing dry and the nurse says of course and sits and reads and eats lunch as the flaps of skin turn transluscent, mammalian, grow fingernails I never knew I could have, and flump into a nearby towel to go to sleep. I want to shake my hand, like they did it that one vid, but seeing it sleep so soundly, I realize I'll have to wait until I can donate a new one. I pull out my hand from my pocket - there since I got on a few stops ago. I guess I'll be at the RV soon.
Donating again already. Has it really been a whole hand ago? Wild how time just... loves itself away. I could never do that. That's a community I could only aspire to. Building world where no world has any right to exist like that. Forming elements, destroying myself. G-d, I wish I could be that creative. I'm nothing. I could never build this bus, that farm, these hands, I can't even take credit fro this breath. I'm some paralysis of shame. No better than the ex-fan trapped in existential amber behind me.
As my stop arrives, I hand that person a sheet of paper wiyh a scribble on it. For craft nights on weekly rotation on this bus route. I hope they go. I say "thank you, operator," though the operator can't hear it behind my mask and my rush. Then I remember what's in my pocket. I pull out the hand, absentmindedly as I release the thanks, and I left it in half gesture. Between all the bodies and the heat and the evaporation making watercolor of everything, I think I make out the shape of the operator's arm raising in response - the hand that would be there making its way through.