The bus is late.

Emme draws her bare wool scarf around her neck in a slight attempt to keep the  indifferent Ice Season wind from taking the last of her essence and carrying it away, away.  Many years of  frozen wind, smoke and bucket-gin has rendered her face both  aged and preserved, her features stuck in an exhausted limbo.   The cold drives itself in, solidifying as the last reckoning of day sun  is walled up behind slabs of black and gray.    The factory had  recently banned work-fires and her apartment block was no longer heated.  She figures it’s been at least two weeks since she’s been warm, the last time standing in line to have her work-card renewed at the labor pavilion.  For nearly two hours she stood underneath a dust-fuzzed heater grate which exhaled a metal wheeze of warm air.   She tries to gather this fading memory close, forcing the thought through her mind like fresh warm blood, but Emme’s skin remains stubbornly thick and numb.  She will definitely have to get drunk tonight.

The remains of a safety poster wheels and stumbles across the veined patchwork concrete road that divides the manufacturing park into two halves, the foundry and the assembly.  The foundry is black, shuttered and inert, impossible that it once glowed day-bright with fire, sparks and a river of red iron.  It did not seem that it was saving itself for the future or sleeping through a winter-season but that it had collapsed into itself and become a negative force, extracting light and heat from the air.  The assembly row was still operating but at such a reduced capacity workers began taking naps on the production tracks.  There was nothing else to do.

The bus is very late.

The bus stop’s shelter has been removed and probably burned for fuel during the last days of the foundry’s operation when soot-colored workers vowed to keep the plant running even though the last carload of coal  had long since departed.  All that remains is a concrete bench, a gray chipped tooth tilting out of the sidewalk.  A blue streetlamp fends the ash darkness.  The lamp is a new thing set in a white pool of fresh cement, an unmarked silver reed topped with a new gadget that produces an unearthly luminescent cloud.

Emme shares the bench with an old oiler who is so sick and alcohol-wrecked that he struggles to stay upright, his head dipping slowly forward only to snap upright, eyes glassed, briefly.  “Hum,” he says.  The wind carries his meaningless sound away, away.  And he drifts back into the slick cave of tired mind and body, his old head too heavy to carry.  “Hum?” he says, springing upright.  He turns.  Emme hears it, too.  The slow, alternating scrape of feet on cracked pavement.

Slipping through the film of black, a young soldier still in uniform, his ribbons, rank and braids rotted and gone, shuffles towards Emme.  The oiler  shows for the first time some awareness of the outer world. “Hung?” he asks.

“Halt! ” Emme commands.   The soldier stops at once and tries to bring himself to attention, stacking himself atop his loose, unsteady bones. “About!” Emme was in the corps, she attended camps.  The calls come to her easily and the well-trained man responds easily.  With wooden comedy, the soldier executes a practiced one-eighty as his bare toes cut a circle in the dust. “Huap!” she calls. His feet mechanically stamp.   And he is off, back into the dark.

“Can you believe that?” Emme asks the oiler, “Some ungrateful family lets one of their dead – war dead – walk around loose.”  “Gung,” the oiler agrees.  An old memory is knocked loose.  “Oxy-King!  For that sun-kissed freshness, don’t just breathe!  Oxy-King!” He slumps forward. He, too is off, back into the dark, away, away.

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