plans

juan lifted the dusty cracked leather lid of his maroon and gold trimmed suitcase, replaced the items he had removed and slammed his palms down on the latch twice, waiting for snap of the latch to reassure him that all his earthly possesions were again safe. he heaved the box on the bus-stop storage stand and stepped back, flexing the cramps from his knuckles and catching a bead of sweat which gathered at his temple. he noticed only one other person on the platform this late on a monday evening. the dense argentinian humidity kept most indoors fighting for sleep on cardboard mattresses, relighting mosquito candles and rocking hysterical infants crazy with flies infesting their soft foreheads.

juan jerked his head in a stiff and unassuming acknowledgment of the filthy younger girl who sat on the electricity box at the far end of the platform, dangling her thongs off two dust-caked bigtoes. the one remaining lamp on the platform illuminated her hair a damp amber tinge. the light streaming above her was swarming with the frantic murmer of a thousand psychotic skeletal figures, each desperate to glow flurescent in the dull light which framed her head like a giant aztec crown.

her head was perfectly upright, staring with grim absence from her throne and across the bus depot to the parallell train tracks. the swing of her pathetic dangling thongs disrupted the harmony of her fixated stare and the above chaos which the light attracted frustrated juan until he could no longer observe the girl without feeling surges of frustration gather on his forehead.

with shoulders tensed in disgust at the dire magesty of the bewitched girl, juan stood impatiently before an ancient flaked royal green steam train which had snaked painfully to a halt and now sat like a giant mutant slug, heaving grotesquely-catching its breath with each scream of steam-oxygen seeping in and out of its soft warm pores. juans concentration was finally broken and he fell into a musty vinal seat, popping springs etching into his lower back. with his life packed carefully into the storage space above his head, juan allowed his eyes to slip helplessly into a desperate unconscious as perspiration from the seats previous occupant sipped into thin denim jeans. through flickering eyelids, the passing platofrm blurred into the past and a bitter farewell was uttered to the effegy on the electricity-box throne and the town which juan had been escaping since the day he was spat into the world.