The girl hunches against the rain’s chill as she stands at the edge of the terminal parking-lot. The lot is almost empty, but she expected it would be. She can’t imagine anyone would choose to climb aboard a travel-bus in the pre-dawn chill of an early spring morning. She pulls up the hood of her jacket, and she lets the back-pack slide from her shoulders, from her hands onto the sidewalk. She sighs and shakes the cramp and cold from her fingers.
The wind tangles itself in the branches of the trees that line the street and edges of the parking-lot. She watches as pale blossoms flutter and tear from their branches to dance with the wind before they fall like snow onto the asphalt.
The girl tries to rub the grit and burn of wakefulness from her eyes - again. How long has she been chasing the stillness of sleep - of dream?
The air tastes of yesterday’s coffee, of sugar, of ocean-salt and oil.
She wraps her arms around herself and stomps her feet to shake the ice from her toes, but it doesn’t work. The girl wonders how far she has walked in the past months.
‘Around the world and back,’ she decides with certainty. She has counted a gazillion steps along sidewalks and down alley-ways.
On week-day mornings, people rushed by her as if they were caught in the white-water of a river. Their brief-cases bumped her ribs as they passed the girl on the side-walk. No one stopped.
Sometimes she sat on a stoop, outside a glass-walled cafe - at the edge of the patio where business-people, and toddlers with parents in-tow, stood in ragged lines while they waited for sandwiches and soups.
Sometimes people offered her coins or coffee.
Once - she found a card-board sign in the scrub-grass behind a bus-shelter. It was bent and torn, and the words upon it were faded. It read; ‘Hungry. Lost. Please help.’ The girl made it her own, and she leaned it against her knees whenever she sat to rest.
“Can I buy you a bit to eat? To drink?” Some asked, and she nodded and tried to smile.
Her heart was bruise. Home was a bruise too. It tasted of dust and tears.
The girl tucked tucked the coins and bills she was given into a cloth she folded against her skin.
Most nights - the girl curled herself into alcoves outside of shops, or into the shadows of bus-shelters. She made herself small, then smaller and she closed her eyes. She whispered stories to herself and sometimes she believed them as she rested on the fringes of sleep.
But last night, her stories remained beyond her reach, her body felt all angles and edges and her brain hummed with an insistent whisper. “Go,” it said, but it offered no destination and the thought plucked at her nerves until the girl clambered to her feet.
The girl walked. She pulled her jacket tight against the rain and followed her shadow into the predawn.
The girl holds exactly seventy-seven dollars in her hand - it will buy her passage to somewhere. She watches a travel bus groan and belch through the parking-lot and into its slot.
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