All We Need is Excuse -(a Short Story)

All We Need is Excuse    

Tariku Abas Etenesh

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"The dustbin is outside for a reason,” he heard a voice. He looked back from where he bent. A girl walked in, passed two rows, and threw herself onto the red padded greying middle seat to the left and slowly squeezed towards the window – face away.  

"This isn’t what you think.” 

“Trash is trash,” she said without turning. 

“This is not a simple bottle,” he said and immediately regretted saying it. It made no sense; at least it would not make sense for her.  

“Step back, doors closing,” the train chimed. 

 For a second, he thought of remaining onboard to explain.  

“Step back, to allow the doors to close.”

“Good night,” he said and stepped out leaving the bottle rolling on the floor. 

When the train slowly slithered away, his eyes were locked with the girl through the window. No hint of accusation was on her face -just a mix of bewildered amusement cuddled by a shy smile. Maybe she was reading his face too.

Walking home, he was overwhelmed; his mind flashed through the past three months like a poem he knew well. A poem whose title aspired to strike a balance between chaos and routine but vacillated into Untitled. A poem with a theme of measured recurrence constituting normalcy. A poem where the only words designated to carry the mechanics of meter, diction, brevity, rhythm, and economy were alarms, waking up, walking, running, tapping, passing, boarding, standing, sitting, arriving, and getting off and repeating. It was just last week he had asked himself, “is this all there is to life?” Now that poem with the theme of recurrence felt for him an archaic word that needed nuanced redefinition. 

What if magic is just the mundane perceived in a context of awe. What if it was him who made his experience monotonous and what if there was no monotony in life after all? What if no one is responsible for his happiness?

It happened after the boarding routine of his day, on the way back home. The scene from inside the train was as usual. He knew all the faces. Tension filled, communication staved, blank starves, suspicion tattooed gazes, sternness hooded souls whose eyes artfully trained to avoid seeking one another as if one’s sins were written on the forehead of the other. The train that more and more felt like storage full of punctuations randomly crammed together deprived of the words, sentence and paragraphs they naturally needed to thrive.

A succession of receding scenes punctuated by momentary darkness, incandescent tunnel lights, views of meadows, parks, and skyscrapers begged for ephemeral attentions before they swished back like a just passed second cast into eternity with a lure of permanence yet mocked by the just born second. 

He didn’t notice his surrounding for much of the ride until the 14thstop. The crowd that was standing near the door, where he sat had thinned away one stop at a time. A girl about twenty stood near the door holding on to the pillar, her eyes too looking outside like many of the riders. In front of him sat stern-faced youngsters comparing pictures from Facebook on each other’s phones. Two women sat on the opposing side both looking outside. A young man in white short-sleeved shirt and a rainbow tie sat next to him, he knew him from their regular rides together but never had exchanged words. His eyes too stared blankly outside on the fading tunnel light swishing back as the train raced ahead. Tired with that he turned inside the old man to his left gave me the casual smile of recognition that dimmed before it was complete. He did the same and moved his eyes to the floor where he saw an empty water bottle at the corner of the door to his right.  

As he was looking, the train turned on a curve moved the bottle to the middle of the floor, right in front of the door - a few inches away from the girl.  He read the label on the bottle Purified drinking water500 ml. Feeling a sense of being seen, he looked up, one of the Facebook sharing young men were looking at him looking at the bottle, and they shared a smile. The bottle rolled again and stopped right under the girl’s legs. She looked at it. By now the old man the two youngsters and the girl were looking at the plastic bottle. The girl felt hesitant between kicking the bottle away or leaving it there. Then it started to roll, to the two young men. All eyes seemed to have found a spot to rest without feeling guilty. One of the young men raised his legs to step on it but as if manipulated by an invisible hand the bottle rolled to the old man sitting right in front of him who bent to grab it, but before he could, the bottle rolled out of his hand- generating laughter from everyone. 

“Looks like, it likes me after all,” said the older woman who found the bottle rolled down near her feet. But like a strange game of invisible hands, the train stopped at the right time and rolled it away from her hands. 

Everyone laughed. 

“Funny ha,” said the young man sitting next to him. Today marks their third month riding the same train, and no words except for smiles were exchanged between them.  

“Let's see who it prefers,” said the lady.

Suddenly, everyone waited for the train to start moving and see where the bottle would head. It was as if everyone was waiting for it to happen. For some excuse to tear down the wall of sternness. As if the missing sentence that made everyone sad punctuations locked in their self-meaning was miraculously found.

“I am going to post this thing on Facebook,” said one voice. 

The fog of suspicion that he knew to hover over everyone in his other rides was not there. 

"Good night folks," said the old man before he left. 

"Good night, night, bye, have a good one,” a chorus of voices replied.

Just like the old man each rider said his version of goodbye. 

He was the last one left when he arrived at his destination. The bottle on the floor. I will let it be there he thought, but then he hesitated to pick it up and throw it away.  He bent and again hesitated and dropped it back on the floor. 

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(January 2018, Los Angeles, California)