By The Minute

I went to the higher education facility to watch four women dance in salt. It was in the next town over. It was about rituals and saturation. I left work at lunch and on the top deck of the first bus I ate a meal deal and all its packaging and the bag it came in and the change from the fiver. The next town over had been straightened and polished since my last visit and I could see my face in the pavement. I spent one pound seventy nine on two books and went to catch the second bus. It drove with its door open, and when it turned to face the way it came I began to suspect I'd assumed too much about my ability to follow basic instructions. I told the driver all about my problems, using small words that fit through the holes in the perspex. I'd meant to catch the fifteen but ended up on the five. I was now late for the thing I'd set off two hours early to be early for. He cackled and burbled and said he hadn't been this amused since he found out his energy provider was the French government and he'd been giving them four or five pints' worth of his sterling every month for the honour of electrifying his hard-working British hovel. He said he couldn't help optimistically remembering that this didn't used to happen when we lived in the past like total idiots who knew nothing about how things were going to have to be in the realistic future. He naively syringed his memories of the public ownership of essential services into my astonished ear canals, then immediately realised he'd have to bury the bus with himself in it under the nearest rugby pitch to atone for this heretical sharing of fact. By this time I was disgracefully late, so I told him I couldn't stick around to help but that I hoped I'd never see him or his opinions again. The third bus took me to the higher education facility, where I crept obnoxiously into the theatre in time to see four women kneeling on a bed of salt scooping air into their mouths.