Sighing, she turned to the bleak view outside the window, watching the trees and sky becoming mere shades of the ominous grey, smeared together by the thickening rain. This seemed the picture of order, the rhythm of the raindrops bouncing off the concrete a much better measure of time than the tick-tock of the clock before her, its black hands a stark contrast to the white face. So she turned it all out; murmurs, screeches, giggles, sighs, footsteps, taps – all but what was blurring the world together: the rain. Pit. Pat. Pit. Pat. And the bell rang. Time to go.
***
She looked at the bright pink and orange layout above the counter; at the combo menus of coffee and doughnuts, at bargains for two and boxed deals for office meetings. She could feel the boredom of the college kid at the counter directed at her, his slightly pale face dotted with zits a mask of indifference.
“What would you like to order?”
“Umm… You do still have those rainbow sprinkled doughnuts, right?”
“Yes ma’am. They’re over there on the bottom rack.”
“Then I’ll have… Umm…” (she could see his eyebrows rise in apathetic impatience out of the corner of her eye) “A glazed chocolate doughnut.”
“One eighty-six.” She fumbled for change. “Thank you and have a nice day,” he said, not looking up once from the register.
She sat on her own at an orange mall table, her back to tables of families, couples, and groups of school kids consuming fast food. She held the iced doughnut in her bare hands, nibbling the slightly sticky sweet.
“Excuse me,” a voice said, and she looked up to find a man in his mid-twenties in a blue sweater holding the chair next to her; “May I take this chair?” She gave her consent in the form of a small smile and a crinkling of her eyes, and the man dragged the chair away.
As she slowly consumed the chocolaty ring, she felt a feeling of dread rise up from the bottom of her stomach, up to her lungs, and finally to her breastbone, at the tip of her throat, when she put the fraction of the doughnut left back into its white paper bag.
She slung on her backpack and walked to the bus stand, then boarded a bus where an elderly woman motioned her to sit next to her with a pat on the seat next to her and a wide, slightly tooth gapped smile. The girl reciprocated with a tight-lipped one, sat down, and promptly put on her headphones.
As the bus lumbered, swayed and jolted through the streets and the white noise coming through her headphones changed; as parents, workers, artists, grocers, spoilt children and carpenters got on and off; as the gas meter on the bus got lower and lower; as the black numbers on digital watches changed; as the rain went pit pat on the bus windows; as the bus got closer and closer to oak street, the girl tried more and more to distract herself. She thought of song lyrics, -OH groups, fingernail dirt and home furnishing; all of them yet neither of them, and the bus got closer and closer to Oak Street
When inside the hospital, the girl took the elevator two floors up and turned right, where a nurse at a desk said with a stern look that Mrs. Black had been waiting for her for over an hour. The girl smiled feebly and walked into a patient’s room. An old woman was sitting up on her bed, propped up by pillows, and looking out the window across the hospital’s capsule of a garden and to the bustle of the traffic; at the umbrellas and the cells phones pressed against ears; at the hands hailing taxies and the changing traffic lights; at cakes being placed in bright bakery windows; at life itself.
“Grandma, I had to stay after school today, sorry I’m late—” the girl said to the back of the head covered in curly wisps of white hair; the arm with the catheter tied to it – but her words bounced off the wise ears like raindrops hitting concrete. Pit. Pat.
