AC, “Consequences”
The bus company that traveled from the top of Welder’s Street to Roadway Avenue, was the only bus company that drove passengers after midnight. It was the same dreary routes each time, neighborhoods with copy-paste housing, abandoned gas stations with hazy, flickering, neon lights, ring roads that from the sky looked like crop circles carved into the city. After the sun had set, nightly bus rides felt more like endless lectures in complicated classes, or old tv reruns of the same, simple-structured sitcoms; so entertaining, yet so mindless.
The city’s evening weather report had forgotten to mention that a moderate to severe rainstorm would strike downtown from the hours of eight pm to four am. That was why, when an empty passenger bus, making its traditional nightly loops, pulled to the side of the road to pick up their only rider of the night, she boarded soaked with frizzy hair and wet socks.
The bus driver barely made an attempt to glance in the woman’s direction, though he had managed to hear the unsettling squish of her drowned rain boots as she stepped into the cart, and saw the quick flash of her red raincoat in the corner of his peripheral vision. His eyes were glazed over with a crystal film of sleep-deprived fatigue, and a faint look of absentminded imagination. He looked to be asleep with his eyes open, driving the bus on autopilot like a zombie.
The woman directed herself to the far back of the bus. The driver never requested her bus pass, perhaps, out of late night forgetfulness, or the pure certainty that he just enjoyed the company of another soul out past their bedtime.
The woman carried with her a fairly sized cardboard box decorated in stickers and crayon markings. The box was frayed, the sides no longer crisp, but deteriorating from what seemed to be caused by years of sitting stuffed in the far back of a dusty closet. The top of the box read Elsie and Nora’s Time Capsule – 2015 in tacky bubble letters. The woman in the red raincoat stared at the font–the ink beginning to bleed out from the rain water–with a nearly sympathetic frown. Her fingers grazed over “Elsie.”
Time capsules were always the things shown in cheesy coming-of-age films, where the characters all promised to return one day, a decade later, and open up said capsule for a temporary wave of nostalgia. In the box, they would place photographs they took, and trinkets they had collected over the years. Symbols of their connections and upbringings. They would seal the capsule closed with a lock or a few layers of duct tape. Bury it in some back yard, or some land near a stream, or hide it away in a room. They would forget about it, as kids who grow into adults tend to do, and when the time finally came, they would reunite to let the memories flood back.
The woman in the red raincoat, as her fingers fluttered over “Elsie,” barely remembered what she had placed inside the box. She was sure there was a picture of her on the first day of fifth grade, wearing a yellow skirt and an orange, polka-dotted top. There had to be the clay figure of the purple dog that she had constructed in her third grade art class–she was sure of it, for she had searched every corner of her home, but could no longer locate the masterpiece. It just had to be in the box.
She tried to close her eyes and remember the other girl. Nora, who was probably in some far away village, in some far away country, on some empty plot of land, surrounded by cold wind and peppermint tea.
Truly, it would have been so simple to open up the flaps of the cardboard, and see what things had been buried. But, in many ways, it felt wrong. The versions of the girls who had crafted the box had been swept from the world, and both were aware of it. The cheesy, coming-of-age movies had failed to represent what happened when the owners of time capsules never did retrieve their box from some back yard, or some land near a stream, or from some room.
When the time finally comes, and the people no longer remember each other, what use is it to try and remember old objects?
And so, as the woman in the red raincoat rode in the dreary back of the bus, staring at the foggy windows, watching as the rain drops on the glass raced each other down crooked paths, she held the box in her arms, and called out for her stop.
The rain didn’t cease when the bus driver pulled over, and the woman hopped down onto the concrete roadside, her boots splashing in a muddy puddle. She set the box down, watching as the ink smudged and the cardboard melted. She waved a small goodbye to the time capsule, and to Elsie and Nora, and to 2015, and returned to the back of the vehicle.
The bus driver made his way back from Roadway Avenue to Welder’s Street.