Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

good enough explanation. And why should it be? Does everything have to be explicable?

I mostly remember in feelings. They are never wrong, but they’re sometimes too vague to be useful. This man is dangerous but in some undefined way. Don’t trust this person but not why, or about what. In Seattle I take the bus to campus, and over time I have built up an emotional memory file on the other regulars who ride that route with me. Unfortunately, nobody’s entry is in credit. Probably they’d say the same about me, though. Perhaps this bus doesn’t see any of us at our best.

Some days, I think the bus itself is sick of us. Poor thing. Weird caterpillar, infested with mites. Imagine a bunch of little parasites climbed inside you every morning, forced you to convey them round and round the same route for hours on end, then they all just crawled out and left you all alone at night, an empty shell in the Seattle rain. What’s worse: when they’re in there, or when they’re gone? When I close my eyes, the engines hum a minor third.

I have to take the bus because I am afraid to drive, but I try not to think about the bus’s body. It’s hardest when I have to stand at the join, one foot in its thorax and one in its abdomen, as the creature shrieks and chafes around corners. Still, I try. Like I try not to absorb the other parasites, their emotions, their conversations, their odours. I have more than enough of all those things. But other people are contagious. Their effluvia seep around me inexorably until my barriers get saturated, give up like a cheap raincoat. Sometimes it’s panic: students on their way to tests, to classes they’ve skipped out on for weeks because their boss demanded night shifts, or their kid was sick, or their landlord renovicted them. Sometimes it’s a more low-key terror: the kind that’s invisible because it’s always there. Like the pattern on the seat covers that nobody ever notices. Just the gentle second-to-second reminders that our time is ticking by with the white stripes and traffic lights, and we aren’t sure if we’re wasting it or doing the best we can. Who can tell us? Perhaps that’s what everyone’s looking for on their phones. Or maybe they’re just trying to maintain their calendars.

Late one rainy autumn evening—I forget exactly when but I was on the bus home from a torpid sort of day—the dregs of a conversation began trickling down from the raised seats behind my back. Its volume was gradually increasing. A man was angry. Something about a dog. Then something about a child.

I tried not to pay attention. I was running through some of the details of Deb’s last day, some things I hadn’t thought about for a while like how I teased her about having a crush on Dr. Humberton, just before she went off to her next lecture.

The angry man continued to crescendo behind me. The bus was crowded but we were all pretending nothing was happening. The more crowded it gets, the less anyone acknowledges anything. Someone else can acknowledge it.

“Lu? Lu! Are you even listening?”

When you can’t see who’s speaking it is easier not to catch their feelings, but if they do get inside you it’s worse. Ghostly, the emotion in those disembodied voices.

“Lulu? Please listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.”

Angry. And desperate. For what? Just to be heard?

No, not just that. He was accelerating, and my pulse matched pace against my will.

“Lu, you have to look at this from where I’m standing. I didn’t do it to hurt you. I never do anything to hurt you. I never do anything that hurts you.”

Things were starting to feel one-sided. Perhaps the other party was just quiet. Or perhaps Lu was at the end of a phone. Then again, perhaps there was no Lu and this was a bus monologue. It wouldn’t be the first one I’d heard and I wasn’t about to turn around and find out. I breathed onto the window beside my cheek. It was cold outside, and specks of bright rain flecked the darkness, but the air on this side was stuffy. A layer of steam formed over the cool glass, bouncing the dim yellow-grey light back inwards, insulating us all from the world beyond our little closed system.

“You’re only seeing yourself in this, aren’t you, Lu? Always thinking about yourself. Well guess what Lu. Guess what Lu. What’s missing from this picture.”

Like I said, my long-term memory is fine, especially the parts I wish I could lose forever. Every minute of those months after Deb disappeared. I would say like they were yesterday, but to be honest yesterday can be a bit of a fog.

I froze, but from the inside, not the outside. You know those handwarmers, the little bags full of fluid, where you click a button and watch the stuff freeze, and somehow it makes the outside of the bag warm up? My body does that. Freezes in the middle so the surface skin gets flushed and pink, hot to the touch.

By now the air was so full of the loud conversation that our oxygen was running out. There was a smell of bergamot and violets, bitter lemon and stale sweat pervading an atmosphere dim and thick as a gaslit Victorian seance. I could still hear the voice, though now it competed with the rushing beat of blood past my eardrums. On and on, back and forth between snarling and whining, always insisting that Lu accommodate another perspective.

And yet Lu’s was the perspective that was absent. The silent voice. Was Lu even real? Did that question matter? Who among us on this stupid journey mattered? Perhaps we’d killed the host, and our caterpillar was now a desiccated husk of brittle tissue with us embalmed in its resinous inner chambers, a huge communal coffin on wheels accelerating us all towards an airless