Generating a Memory
One night in April, Cotton decided to stand outside at the bus stop and have the wind whip her hair on her cheeks. While she waited, she had earbuds playing her a shuffle of what she had to listen to that night. Her feet tapped, she looked into the street, and she wondered where she might be able to go to eat before she went over to Miguel and Oval’s house.
When the bus arrived, she stepped on, scanned her metropass, and walked into the fourth seat on the left by herself. While sitting, Cotton gazed out of the windows and watched the corners of buildings bend toward her and then suddenly away if she managed to look behind. Twisting her body to look over her shoulder was a good practice for perception, but Cotton felt too tired to do any of this tonight. Instead, she focused on letting her mind wander and consider where some of her bus fellows might be headed that night.
Home from work. She had just finished an eight hour shift (eight and a half if you count the unpaid breaks) at a warehouse packing plastic tupperware. Jucelia had another busy day tomorrow cleaning up after her small family, but she didn’t want to let herself get too stressed out. In fact, Jucelia had found that her partner was able to handle things by herself. Cleaning after their only child, Gabriel, she found that there was usually just one thing that could really stress her out and it was if her partner, Maria, would stay waiting for her as she filled in hours missing, disappeared, gone. What is life like without practices of connection?
Cotton arrived at the stop right before the Happy Tomato Salad Bar and she decided to get out. Fifteen minutes before they close, she could at least pick up scoopfuls of spinach drizzled with other light vegetables and vinegars. Something quick, she thought. But when the bus didn’t slow down, she had to go up to the front. “Hey, can I be let off here?”
And everything came to a halt. She moved quickly through the pressured wind and ran her cycle of ordering and paying for the salad she had pictured. Cotton half-ate her salad and gazed at down the roads while she returned to her bus stop. The jacket she had on shook in the wind so she decided to zip it up.
Waiting for another ten minutes, Cotton wondered when the route normally stopped. She had been used to a midnight curfew but had not taken this line before. Her friends must wonder what kept her running late since her decision to get food had come to her suddenly. Gathering her muster, she sent them a message notifying them.
“Bought a salad at Happy Tomato. Be there in a jiff.” Cotton looked again toward the horizon of the Helman Road. Now that she was eating, she wondered if she should save it for later when she was even more hungry. After about three minutes and a fifth of the salad later, the bus arrived. Cotton chose a seat further back on the bus so that she could enjoy her salad in a seat to herself.
The bus ran its normal route and Cotton panicked believing that the salad had taken her out of her awareness of the bus’s stop routine. Once she arrived, Cotton climbed down the stairs and walked another three minutes down a sidewalk where her shirt rubbed on the flowering branches of camellia bushes and conifer foliage. When she arrived, she felt confident she was at the right house after having seen the violet lights coming out of the upstairs windows. Cotton knocked and was being led in by Miguel a minute later.
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“We were worried you might have gotten lost. Glad you made it okay,” reassured Miguel, not making note of her late-arrival despite her two declarations of ETA.
“Hey! Hi, Co. We made tea, I hope you’ll drink some,” called Oval after walking back into the kitchen once she had squeezed Cotton for twenty seconds.
“Your house is really nice, what’s this angel’s name?” called out Cotton as she pet a long-haired black cat that had come up to rest on her leg. Cotton took a seat on the couch and thanked Oval for the mug of oolong tea she had taken into her hands. “Bacillus.”
“Cillus, for short,” mentioned Miguel. “Oval thought of the idea after she took a series of microbiology and pathogen classes. At the time, Cillus was much longer and more thin. A young baby.”
Sweeping her hands through its fur, Cotton glanced up at her two friends and they discussed the classes they had been taking that semester as well as work. Cotton felt her eyes becoming dry as the conversations continued, but she felt security in Cillus as the cat continued to return to rub up on her feet.
“This summer. Right before I leave for Granada, I will finally be able to move my things out of the crummy basement room on 18th.” Cotton rubbed her eyes as she explained her eagerness to move out of the house she had been renting with friends for a year and a half.
“We’ve lived on this side of Maple for about three years and the taxes have been pretty manageable. Maybe we could finally get our waffle group back together.” They all laughed after Oval reminded them of a group of seven who would get together to make recipes involving waffles.
Having finished her tea, Cotton excused herself to go to the restroom. After she locked the door, she looked at her eyes in the mirror. “Red, blotchy,” she mumbled to herself as she pulled down her cheeks with her index fingers.
“I want to be less like Cotton and more like Plasmodesmata,” groaned Cotton as she leaned toward the mirror.
That night she would have to ride back on a bus and spend forty minutes trying to fall asleep. But for now, she had business to take care of.
