Old Lady on Bus

“I’m doing alright now, I suppose. I’m much better than twenty years ago. Heh, heh you wouldn’t guess that, but it’s true. You see me now, dirty and old, but if you knew me then- dirty and young. It’s worse when your young. I would lie at night shivering and schemeing. Shiveer and scheme, shiver and scheme. That’s what my life was. Plan plan plan. Sometimes they really workeeed. But mostly I was down. Now I’m up at least for me. Up up away. You know? Yeah, well, my sister always was a problem back then, but now she’s much better. Yep, married, has 6 kids at last count. There’s Karen, Kelly, Keith, Ken, Kathleen, Kate, oh, yeah original, huh? Have you ever met them? Cute little buggers. Eat too much chocolate, much too much chocolate but that’s Daddy’s fault. He comes home from work aaat eleven at night and gives them each a Hershey’s bar to make up for never talking to them. They kids eat it as if they were eating up his love. Chocolate daddy. Instead of making them stronger it just makes them rounder. Sis says nothing. She’s too busy buying the roast, unwrapping the roast, pounding the roast, spicing the roast, tying the roast, cooking the roast, cutting the roast, serving the roast, and cleanning up after the roast. She loves the roast so much that she never realizes, or cares, that she’s making up seven servings instead of eight. The kids don’t bug her much as they know how Sis doesn’t like to be interupted in her affair with the roast. A belt or two has helped them learn their lesson quickly. People think I’m scary, they used to call me an addict, but at least it never affected anyone else. Sis was addicted to babies, but when that phase was over, she was out of there. I don’t mean physically, but out of the mother mode. Once they stopped being cute and started eating the same roast she ate, they stopped being hers and started being their own in her mind. “

She smiled with her nicotine colored teeth her yellowish stained hair hung limp like an old ragged scarf around her face. A few red marks on her face stood out as either frostbite or severe acne scars. I could not figure out exactly which they were. All I knew was that I was only four stops away from freedom from this lady. Nod and smile. I uncrossed my legs and accidentally bumped my leg into hers.

“Ooh, my leg. Oh, you know I had surgery on it years ago. They said they’d have to cut it off, but I wouldn’t let them. Just keeping it there for all the good memories it gave me. There were the birthday parties up until I turned ten. Me and my sister would make races up and the winner would win an extra piece of cake. Of course, we would always end up sharing it anyway. Well, how could you eat that cake when you knew that Sis wanted it just as much as you. I always had to split it, but I’d take the bigger piece.