Ways of Being Free

Liza Richardson

It started with a flutter in her stomach, faint traces of something forgotten; it was a sensation that Mary knew only from her childhood, that mixture of excitement and fear, and it always brought tears to her eyes.

Nick glanced her way, a hint of worry betraying itself through the little squinting lines at the corners of his eyes; he wondered why she was crying. His hand rose from its place on the cracked leather bus seat, should he comfort her? He didn’t know.

Mary looked up at him from beneath her lashes, afraid to meet his gaze, but wanting to see some recognition there, some love. He gazed at her quizzically, she snuggled farther into the curve of his arm; the air was so cold, chilly like the look on the bus driver’s face as he stared forward, always forward to the road.

“I need to get off.” Mary whispered, “Now.” This more loudly, voice shaking, finally meeting Nick’s gaze.

“What’s that, honey?” he asked sleepily.

“I have to get off the bus right now.” She begins to rise. The only other passenger, an old man, grizzled and world weary, glances up at her tiredly. Mary stands, ignoring Nick’s hand as it tugs on the hem of her cheap cotton dress, urging her to sit down. She lurches forward when the bus stops at a corner, she falls to the ground.

“Sit down, you have to sit down.” This was the bus driver with the pallid complexion and the dead eyes.

Wait, she thinks, how can he even be alive? Mary suddenly found herself wondering at her own life: was it real, tangible, did it even exist? How could she be sure that she was living? It frightened her, this thought, that maybe she wasn’t alive, and she began to sob uncontrollably.

The dark corners of her mind began to consume her, she felt misery beginning to eat away at her like hunger; death was imminent, or had already arrived, one day soon she would be less than she already was. She would lose her life, her love, her body, one day soon she would be nothing. Echoes of Nick shouting her name lingered in the corners of her mind as she continued to sob, but she dismissed them, Nick was temporary, a part of her that would soon be gone.

She began to scream, resisting the pull of depression, not wanting to concede to the darkness.

As she lay on the floor, eyes unfocused, sobbing uncontrollably and screaming empty, meaningless words, Nick panicked.

“Sir,” he shouted to the bus driver, “You must stop the bus, oh please stop. God, oh God, my Mary.” The bus driver slowly turns his head to look Nick in the face, his colorless eyes boring through all the layers of Nick’s emotion to his core, and he slowly shakes his head, “No, I’m sorry, sir. Please help the woman back to her seat now.” His cold gaze returns to the road, looking ahead, always ahead.

Nick begins to cry, his hands covering his face. “Oh,

Mary, why now?” He was frightened; this wasn’t supposed to happen on the bus.

Nick looks up, startled when the old man speaks in a creaky, weary voice. “You need to show her life.” The old man nods his head, long dreadlocks swaying, and for a moment nick doesn’t register the man’s words, instead continuing to sob, hand gripping the metal guardrail by the bus door.

“You need to remind her of living, show her what it was to live.” The man looks at Nick with his heavily lidded eyes, soft brown eyes that beg trust. He continues when Nick does not respond: “What did she love the most, what lights her up?” Nick sits up shakily; drying his cheeks, soaking in the old man’s calm and trying to ignore the chaos in his wife’s eyes, her tangled brown hair.

“She always loved bugs. Insects. She would sit there studying a dragonfly for hours, I never understood it.” Nick’s shoulders begin to tremble, as he thinks of his wife in one of her rare moments of sanity, and the old man’s lip curls into a smile,

“I have just the thing,” he says, “we can make the little miss calm as a kitten, you and I.” The old man reached into his tattered briefcase and Nick drew in a breath of anticipation as the man drew his cupped hands back out of the bag, opening them before Nick’s face.

Crawling along the old man’s leathery palm was a dragonfly; its translucent wings spread wide, veins silvery in the passing moonlight.

The dragonfly’s wings begin to vibrate; it takes off from the old man’s hand, and glides toward Mary. By now she is no longer screaming, but instead throwing a physical fit, intent on hurting herself, on freeing herself from the monster of doom that seems to swim within her. She does not calm when the dragonfly flits before her face; she doesn’t even notice, too busy with some internal struggle to pay attention to a bug, an insect.

Then suddenly, as Nick leans forward in anticipation, the dragonfly lands on her head, she drops; no more struggling, no more movement at all. The old man’s lip curves into a smile, the bus driver glances back, and then forward, forward to the road.

Nick cries out, running forward with the bus still moving, dropping to his knees upon reaching Mary.

“Mary, oh Mary!” he cries, and he grabs her hand. The stopping of blood in her fingertips is a visible thing, her skin begins to turn white, and Nick finds himself unable to speak, unable to utter sound that might describe how he feels.

“She’s at peace now.” Says the old man quietly, and Nick returns to his bus seat, dragging his wife’s body with him.

The bus driver glances back as the bus stops, “Time to get off,” he says, turning his head back towards the road, looking forward, always forward to the road.