“It’s raining again today,” someone said.
Raining, I thought. Yeh. Raining. Right. Raining P’s a Q’s all over the world. Cats & Dogs. Cadillacs and Spaghetti Westerns. Whatever…
Actually, it wasn’t at all the kind of day you’d expect any talk of rain… It must’ve been over a hundred degrees in Downtown Los Angeles, and if it was raining anywhere, I sure as shit didn’t notice in the surging heat of the moment. I’d already set fire to my bathroom earlier that afternoon, but that’s another story…
As if that wasn’t enough, Wilshire Boulevard was absolutely glowing now, completely bathed in this terrible apocalyptic red hot mist shimmering from building to building like a mirage all the way down the line.
As I stood waiting for the bus, every breath I took was like a burning dry gasp of Moroccan desert dust. Armageddon… And some idiot on the bus stop thinks it’s raining…
“Well, maybe it is,“ I muttered to myself, handing the bus driver my two bits. Maybe it is raining in Rio de Janeiro or Hong Kong or Madagascar…
The driver flashed me a strange glance as he handed me the ticket and the bus took off into the traffic. I walked up the aisle and sat down in an empty seat near the back by the window and waited.
I didn’t think of rain anymore as the bus rolled along the hot shiny black asphalt. I looked out the window. People scurried about like flaming red ants. It was quite a spectacle. The bus rolled on and it seemed to get hotter and hotter as I sat there watching the world burn outside.
People got on and off at different stops. They sat talking and reading newspapers as it got hotter and hotter and hotter in there. Pretty soon the heat was absolutely stifling. It began to make me nervous. Suddenly, FOOOF! A newspaper flares up in a man’s hands right in front of me, burning up as if a torch had been set to it from below.
to be continued…
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009
hilarious. juuuuust hilarious!!