Please Use Rear Exit: Chapter 1 – The Brown BTWN Moments0

by Brandon Perkins

for the record, this is some shit i just thought of y’all, science fiction that’s not admissable in no court of law. 

– mf doom

Everyone on the bus was horribly disfigured. Warts, scars, stains, blemishes, matted hair, and various other dismembering smells. Fifth-generation t-shirts that started with sports-playing grandsons ended their tattered saga on the drooping shoulders of a youngin’s great grandmother. Hand-me-downs were hand-me-ups. It all went in reverse. The passengers sat two-by-two or stood in the aisles, grasping sweaty bars for balance. Their day to day bus was taking them into the night and the Brown Between had a tendency to jerk rather suddenly.

The bus ran from Los Angeles’s most maligned residential line (Compton’s Circle) to the #720 and back again. Higher class routes existed for higher-class passengers who lived in fancier places. It was mostly the poor that rode the Brown Between. Its primary purpose was to shuttle the cleaning staff, rat catchers, dishwashers, fast food short order chefs, sheet metal deburrers, and other employees of undesirable servitude to and from their overcrowded residential complexes on an impossibly rickety set of tracks-and the Brown Between was the only line in the city that still seemed to be on tracks. When the seats were comfortable they felt infested with unimaginable insects. And when they weren’t comfortable? The fabric looked frightfully diseased and the insects actually crept up everyone’s legs.

Mikhail’s weekly Friday night trek from his studio apartment in Compton’s Circle to the #720 was always his most awkward. He stood out among the factory rats in their greased overalls and the solemn families with all those grocery bags full of empty cans. During the day he wore an employer-issued uniform, just like them, but Mikhail’s Friday night clothes were truly his Sunday best. His trek to work, from Compton’s Circle, instilled in him a sense of authenticity that was lacking on LA’s nicer routes, but his weekend wardrobe-designer white tee, skinny jeans, his requisite Dipset scully-made him feel like a poser. None of the other passengers would be spending $300 on booze over the next six hours and Mikhail’s change of costume made everyone aware of this fact. And, until the Party Kids transferred from the Triangle-the second to last stop before the #720-Mikhail would ride alone through The Internet in the middle of all that knowing tension generated by such an economic reality.

Their silence was almost deafening and would’ve been nearly unbearable were it not for the nails-on-chalkboard screech of the rust-bucket bus in motion. Over the whirring gears and gaskets that transformed the power of The Internet into locomotion, people swayed and slept, moving to the ebbs and flows of the rickety transit. Weaving in and out of consciousness with the twists and turns of the Brown BTWN’s shucks and jives, it was a brief moment of harmony. Nearly all of them were strangers and yet, they all seemed to slumber in a uniting rhythm.

The Brown BTWN was mildly crowded, its seats occupied by about 40 people and two bags of cans. Mikhail’s Converses chucked under a set of seats in the bus’ exact middle. He had a foot of space in each direction between those standing and swaying in the aisle alongside him, and the lucky little family that grabbed a seat. But the young boy in his father’s lap was definitely not sleeping, even as his parents’ eyes were heavily shut. He pushed the top of his head firmly into his father’s chest, arching his squirmy body and pushing his feet against the seat in front of them. He stuck a dirty fist into his pop’s cheek, pushing before eventually tapping with an exponential fervor. The taps came sooner and soon became punches. Pop’s fat mouth swallowed the young boy’s grimy hand whole. Pop’s eyes never opened, he just playfully gnawed his son’s chubby wrist. Growled a bit. His only son quietly giggled. The entire interaction was incredibly silent.

Everything suddenly came to a halt. All the air inside the bus slammed forward in a bit of bitter rage. An old lady to Mikhail’s left, crashed into him at the BTWN’s sudden stop. He picked up her plastic leg-which flew forward at an alarming rate, but fell just a few feet in front of him-and handed it back to her. She had no teeth and a patch of scarred skin covered what should’ve been her left eye, but she smiled genuinely. As she steadied her hand on Mikhail’s shoulder, she screwed the leg back into place, grateful for his aid. Maybe Mikhail wasn’t so out of place after all.

People got off the bus but more people got on, as the overhead announcement urged everyone to move towards the back. Mikhail found himself directly on top of yet another family, located seven rows behind the squirmy son and his poor pops. This time, everyone was alarmingly awake, especially the little girl that sat on her mother’s lap.

“Mommy, Ms. Brisson says that a caterpillar can turn into a butterfly, do you believe that, Mommy? Ms. Brisson says that a caterpillar eats and eats and eats and eats and then goes to sleep and then it wakes up as a butterfly, Mommy, the caterpillar before it sleeps, it throws up all its food on itself and makes a sleeping bag to sleep in, do you believe that, Mommy? That’s what Ms. Brisson says and she’s soooo smart, Mommy.”

Mommy nodded. Her child was the loudest thing on the bus, even louder than the grinding gears and unrelenting push of the vehicle’s motor. Even with eight legs, the child was beautiful and beautiful was rarely seen around those parts. Everyone on the bus gave her a pass because they knew she’d go places that they would never venture, places that their children probably wouldn’t either. Her hair was in braids and the longest strand dangled in front of her face. She pulled it down past her chin and was quick to bite the braid’s tip between her teeth.

“Mommy, you won’t even believe this,” she said, still sucking on the braid, “but Ms. Brisson says that tentacles turn into frogs, Mommy, do you believe that?” Mascara marked the child’s eyes. Big brown eyes batted in her mother’s direction. A teal ribbon balanced on her head like a tiara. She knew that she looked like a princess despite-or perhaps especially-in eight white sandals so scuffed.

“Mommy, a tentacle moves like this,” her arm wiggled slowly from side to side like a snake in the water before her writhing limb reached up and began playing with the lone braid that symmetrically divided her dark porcelain face, and even though she meant tadpole instead of tentacle, it didn’t matter, “and it swims and swims and then it goes to sleep in the mud and it wakes up as a little tiny, tiny frog,” she brought her fingers in real close to her face and left the smallest gap between them, “it’s so small, Mommy, but then it grows bigger and bigger and bigger and sometimes, that little tentacle wakes up as a big old fat bullfrog. They ribbit. Ribbit! Why do they ribbit, Mommy?”

Mikhail imagined that Katya was a similarly precocious child. She was reading before she was speaking and once she spoke, she never stopped. But Katya was born into an affluent family. As was Saffron, and for that matter, there was a good chance that any girl he was about to meet would have inevitably been raised in an environment that would thumb their nose at this little girl’s family. He hoped that this child, so concerned about tentacles and butterflies, would remember where she came from, that it would help ground her, and not at all in a matter that she felt was owed to her. Mikhail thought about finding a girl with perspective that he could spend his life with. He wanted to inspire that girl, that girl which he hadn’t yet met, and it made him want to inspire this little child so concerned with the lessons of Ms. Brisson. He thought about answering the girl’s question, about why frogs ribbit, but something about interrupting a conversation always made him blush.

“You’re so smart,” Mommy said, kissing the child’s forehead.

“Why didn’t you want to be smart, Mommy? I like being smart because I get to know things that other people don’t get to know because they’re not smart and that’s why I like school, Mommy, but why don’t you go to school, Mommy? You should go to school because I know everything and you only know almost everything, Mommy, why don’t you go to school so you can know everything like me?”

Mommy kissed her child’s forehead again, mumbling something about being so smart, so proud. She repeatedly kissed the child’s face with increasing zeal, but without a smile. The child furrowed her brow, deep in thought, biting down on the braid to show the world her contemplation. She slapped at a fly that attempted to land anywhere its wings could rest.

“That fly used to be a legless glop of white goop,” Mikhail said, winking at Mommy. That wasn’t so bad. “It was born out of garbage, trash, all the junk we throw out. It went to sleep and grew wings.”

“Mommy, is that true? Did the goop grow wings?”

Mommy nodded and pulled the yellow chord that hung to her left. From the ceiling, an automated man’s deep voice announced and then politely demanded, “Stop requested. Please use rear exit.”

“I love school. Why don’t you go to school, Mommy? Ms. Brisson is so smart and pretty, just like me, why don’t you want to be smart and pretty, Mommy?”

The bus casually slowed to a stop. No legs were lost. Led by the hand, the child stood up on all eight of her scuffed sandals. Mommy and an exhausted father arose. They impatiently huffed and puffed their way through the stragglers still struggling with their stuff-sloths blocking the aisles-towards the front of the bus and an unhappy transfer onto the #780. Tired workers took the family’s seats and Mikhail moved towards the door, making a bee-line for his weekly sweet spot. Comfortably wedged between a bench and the wheel cap, no one would ask him to move once all the Party Kids piled in by the rowdy and rabid dozens a few transfers down the line. His position allowed him to be among the first to exit onto the #720. It wasn’t that he was anxious to meet up with his friends for a new-again night out, he just didn’t want to deal with all those people.

Editor’s Note: Please Use Rear Exit is an online novel, you can read about it on author Brandon Perkins’ SG Contributor page.