Can't You See I'm Sleeping?
Diane opened one eye.
Not all the way. Just enough to make contempt visible.
"Can't you see I'm sleeping?" she muttered.
Her voice was low and lazy, but it carried. On a bus, everything carried. There were no private insults when knees were touching and strangers could smell one another's coffee.
Liam kept his hands on his lap.
"I can see your foot on my armrest," he said.
A woman in a damp green coat looked up from the blank black screen of her phone. The man in the gray flat cap across the aisle pressed his lips together. Two teenagers at the back stopped laughing at whatever had been funny before.
Diane shifted her shoulder against the window and pushed the shoe deeper onto the armrest.
The plastic gave a tiny creak.
"It's a bus," she said. "Relax."
Liam looked at her foot again. He thought about his mother, who had cleaned buses at night for fourteen years and came home smelling of disinfectant and rain. She used to say people revealed themselves by how they treated spaces they did not own.
At twelve, he had thought she meant litter.
At twenty-three, he understood she meant power.
The bus lurched past a line of shops. The shoe rubbed again, leaving a dusty crescent where his elbow should have been.
The man in the flat cap gave him a quick look. Not help. Not permission. More like apology.
Liam was tired of apology from people who had done nothing wrong.
He turned forward.
Diane smiled with her eyes closed.
May you like
She thought silence meant victory.
That was her first mistake.
