Featured in 2015 Spring Issue of Rambunctious
By Aryana Nazem, ’17
It seems like a long time ago when I first saw that feeble lady, sitting on a wooden bench. waiting for bus 108 to Brooklyn like the rest of us. That wooden bench with the faded lacquer and two rusted armrests was where she sat all through the winter days and summer months, bundled and waiting for that bus to take her to Brooklyn. I was ten at the time but I remember her. She never smiled, even when I’d wave at her the first time I rode the bus home. I wondered what she’d been through, you could tell she had been scarred. The pain that lay in her glassy eyes, the steal in her face, she was a fighter.
It was summertime of my senior year, the last day I’d probably ever ride bus 108. I sat next to her, and gave her a peony, the same flower that was on the brooch she wore everyday. She looked at me and a tear glided right off her cheek and melted her iron face. She held my hand and nodded.