How I Lost My Shoe
A chilled October morning, and the bus is late. I am late for an Economics class, a fact that doesn’t hurt my feelings at all. The professor has done little more than parrot capitalist rhetoric for the last month and a half, and while I respect capitalism as an idea, I have difficulty agreeing with the principle. I wish I lived in Sweden.
When the bus finally comes, it’s packed with people, mostly students with a peppering of older people on their way to work. There’s no place to sit down and little room to stand. I’m wedged between a pretty girl just close enough for me to smell her shampoo, and a hideously obese man I could smell from across the bus.
People stare out of the windows or read papers or books, nearly a hundred people in close proximity with nothing to say to one another. I think about saying something to the pretty girl behind me, and my throat closes up with fear. The bus sways, and strangers bump into one another, muttering those Canadian apologies that translate into “Fuck off,” or “Watch where you’re going.” First I bump into the pretty girl and I blush and I mutter. Then I run into the fat man, and I give him my best “You completely disgust me.” It sounds like “Sorry,” but that’s not how you’re supposed to hear it.
Another stop, more people cram in. I’m uncomfortably aware of my leg touching the pretty girl’s. I try to forget that the rest of me is pressed against the fat man on the other side.
The bus pulls away from the stop and my mind goes off to find whatever it can in the hinterlands of my imagination. I try to think about whisking the pretty girl off to Aruba and living the rest of my days as a bartender on the beach. Someone is yelling at the back of the bus in a language I don’t speak, distracting me. He looks like a student in a winter coat and a back-pack.
He disappears in a burst of fire. Glass shatters in a visible wave from the back of the bus. Crushing pressure and searing heat push into me, and the smell of burnt hair assaults my nose. Confusion sets in, pandemonium, a press of arms and legs and bodies. The fat man is on top of me, the pretty girl beneath us both, and I feel a sharp pain in my leg. I hope it’s not broken. I can’t afford a hospital visit, and my Alberta Health Care hasn’t been paid in ages.
The back of the bus is in tatters, streams of wrecked smoking metal and plastic. Trinkets of glass cling to the sides of the windows where the rubber frame hasn’t come off completely. Someone’s hand is on the bottom of the stairs. The arm it’s supposed to be attached to is a couple of stairs above it, ending in a ragged stump. The people at the back of the bus are all dead, charred husks oozing blood and fat. Some of them are still burning, the smoke billowing out of the back of the bus and sifting into the front. I realize I’m breathing people, and I throw up. It doesn’t make me feel any better. Usually it makes me feel better.
People are pushing at the doors, fumbling at the emergency latches, forgetting how to open them, even though they’ve read the instructions a million times while bored. Now that it matters, they might as well be illiterate.
Me, I’m frozen. There’s a five-hundred pound gorilla on top of me, and a pretty girl pinned beneath. I think I may have puked on her. She’s struggling and pushing and beating on me to get free. My face is covered in people-ash. I can’t figure out what I should be doing. I should push the fat bastard off of me. I should hide beneath him until the EMTs and Paramedics and Fire Fighters arrive. I should do something. I just can’t figure out what that something should be.
My leg hurts. Most of me hurts, but my leg hurts the worst. I should chew my leg off and hobble to safety. I should chew the fat man off of me and hobble to safety. I should just pound on him futilely.
The reporters arrive before the rescue workers. They always do.
Flashes go off all around the bus, and I have a vague sense of people speaking, but I can’t make anything out over the fire and the screaming. A helicopter is thumping above the bus, and I’d bet it’s not a rescue chopper. The sirens are still distant, and they don’t sound anywhere near as urgent as they should.
The girl beneath me grips my shoulder, hard. Faded red fingernail polish tips each of the fingers of her hand. Was the pretty girl wearing fingernail polish? I can’t remember. Something pushes the hand down hard, and my leg throbs with the change in pressure. It’s definitely broken. I hate casts. They’re expensive and they’re itchy.
The pretty girl wriggles out from under me and starts screaming for help, punctuated by the flashing of lights. She could be on a runway.
One of the passengers figures out the emergency hatches. I can’t see the driver; I hope he’s alright. A wave of humanity rushes the open door. The door is too small to let everyone out at once, and the press of bodies plugs it. In a rush, the relatively unharmed survivors are out, some face first on the pavement. Flash! Front page pictures are captured in digital perfection all around us.
The sirens get closer. A few police are on the scene and an ambulance from the University Hospital. Neither is enough. There’s no one to arrest. There are too many injured for one ambulance crew; two people can only do so much.
They start triage. That’s something. They move through the human wreckage and make pronouncements of judgment. The word “Black” is repeated like a mantra, said over and over until I’m sure they’re not describing the shade of the seats. It doesn’t really bother me until they walk past the fat man on top of me.
“Black,” the paramedic says his voice neutral. I hadn’t even noticed when he stopped breathing. He’s still so warm. His body changes as I look at it: before he was a terrible inconvenience; now, it is as though I’m covered by some huge and disgusting maggot.
The paramedics go through the whole of the bus. They ask me how I’m doing, and I confess I probably have a broken leg. The make me a secondary priority and go about helping the people who need it the most.
So I wait. I wait in an exploded bus with a five hundred pound dead man weighing down on me. These bombings have a reputation for being exciting, fearful affairs. Sure, there was that. But then the adrenaline’s worn off, and you spend a couple of hours waiting for the paramedics to decide a busted up leg is more important than the girl with abdominal hemorrhaging.
I start to feel a little woozy. My head spins like I’ve had a few too many before deciding to get blown up. I ignore it until the medics decide to pick up the fat man. I do not envy paramedics their jobs.
“Well shit,” one of them whispers as the fat man rolls off of me. The two of them (were they the first two, the triage medics?) begin speaking in medical code and working busily around my leg. One of them picks up a severed foot.
It’s covered in gore and wearing my shoe. I lose consciousness wondering if I’ll get discounts at shoe stores for only needing the one…
I wrote this quite a while back. It’s an alright story, I suppose. Thought I’d share it with you here.
