Little young Sarah looked down at her watch. Ten to three. It was a hand-painted wrist watch, with uneven spacing between the minutes, two crooked blue hands and no battery. Little Sarah believed time should be a thing of perspective, and she had a biased fancy for the time two to three. However, seated on the heat-seared metal bench listening to people and trolleys and engines whistling past, she almost wished time passed faster.
New Year Eve at the bus interchange was a bomb of activity. Sarah sat on her metal bench, with the quiet and stillness of the eye of a tornado, as all around her, sights, sounds and smells tried to lure her from her seat. To her right, a food stall selling New Year cookies was attracting idle passengers like a crumb of toast would a swarm of ants. The crowd grew so big and the queue to pay grew so long that the stall was a belly at the verge of bursting. The smells of fresh-out-of-oven green pea cookies and pineapple tarts waltzed their way towards Sarah, tempting her, but as she took another deep breath to bottle up the aroma, the cookie smells scurried away back to their stall, hiding away from the sinister engine gases. Poor Sarah choked on the evil exhaust gases from the five incoming buses that reminded her of rotten eggs on rusted plates. She grimaced.
One by one, the lime-green buses screeched to a halt in front of her, each one with passengers pouring out like tea from a teapot. Many almost tripped over like dominoes as they scrambled to regain footing on the unfamiliar stable ground after a long journey which left them with jelly as legs. Before the last passenger could get off, a new wave of commuters was already squeezing through the front doors of the bus, as the bus captain hollered in vain for them to make way for a tiny elderly lady who looked like fragile china. When the bus ballooned into a vacuum pack of squashed passengers, the doors slammed shut in the faces of frustrated people who rolled their eyes as they slumped back to wait for the next bus. The whites of their eyes scared Sarah and she hugged her Barbie bag a little tighter.
People flowed into the bus stop around her and Sarah found each breath she took increasingly stained with perspiration, impatience and the occasional coffee aroma. Admist the indistinct chatter, her ears perked up as someone started singing festive songs in Chinese. Squinting through the thighs of office workers excited to reunite with their kids, Sarah saw an old man with a head as bald as an egg shell, passionately strumming on his electric guitar as he sang at the tops of his lungs, the New Year songs with a hoarse tinge to them. A crowd started forming around him and, fuelled with the cheers and ovation from his amused audience, he attempted to dance. Laughter rang clear as church bells as the old singer did his best to not look like a frog trying to walk.
“He’s just wanting to attract attention,” muttered a grumpy old lady to her friends but Sarah did not think so. She thought the old singer was only trying to deserve the attention he had already attracted.
The buses zoomed in and zoomed out. The crowd thinned and thickened. The waiting queue shortened and lengthened. The drizzle came and went. Time passed and did not return. The bus stop was a restaurant with the highest turn-over rate, with passengers squeezing under the shade, bodies sticking like stacked spoons next to each other, just so as to avoid a single drop of rain from staining their perfectly ironed clothes. Twice, boots stepped unknowingly into the puddle of rain in front of Sarah, sending huge splashes of muddy water that even her Barbie bag could not shield her from. She watched the raindrops roll down the gutter of the edge of the roof, like shining beads on an abacus. Plop plop plop. Sarah looked at her watch.
Ten to three, it told her.
Then, as she was admiring the dying rainbow which formed in the puddle, she heard a familiar shout.
“Sarah!”
Sarah glanced up and, across the uneven shoulders of the moving crowd, in between the black backpacks and glittery handbags, amongst the sea of stoic faces that marched towards the buses like an army, she found her. Sarah locked eyes with her mother and ran, trying not to get trampled, through the vast sea of people to the horizon, where her mother was waiting with outstretched arms. Knocking the wind out of herself as she clung on tightly to her mother, Sarah giggled. Her heart fizzled with pink bubbles of love, warmth and joy. She looked at her watch.
Ten to three. Indeed, this was her favourite time of the day.
photo credits: Arthur Osipyan, Manki Kim, Neal Chopra
A descriptive piece full of visual and emotional elements, which make a simple plot interesting. Good job!