RED

by Anonymous

I pass by the same clock everyday, hanging on a wall in an office I can see from the street through a window. I check to see how close to nine it is. Not that it matters. It's just a habit. This morning the clock was gone.

The stranger on the street sneezes off in the distance, when I pass him five seconds later I say "bless you." He says "thanks." We've been waiting our whole lives to have this one short conversation and we'll never speak to each other again.

The extrospective voice from the backseat is speculating about probability and says "The world is so big that right now somewhere else on the planet there's two parents driving in a Jeep on their anniversary with two daughters and one is texting and one is talking."

"Wanna take the elevator?" Larry asks me and starts laughing at our little inside joke. I look over at him enjoying his face laughing, his white hair, his lovable eccentricity. Riding the escalator he starts telling me about a kid who once got a shoelace stuck. "There's an emergency button," he says just as the escalator responds by stopping cold. The commuters starting climbing instead of riding.