YOU’LL KNOW IT WHEN YOU’RE OLD

by Frank Rizzuto

Imagine yourself clinging to an overhead strap with one hand while clutching an overstuffed briefcase and a soggy, unfurling umbrella in the other. The air inside the bus is thick with halitosis, stale cigarette smoke and B.O., and diesel fumes are drifting in through the open windows. You’re exhausted. The workload today was absurd, the boss especially cruel, and your mail slot contained a layoff notice. You want “off” this sweaty, lumbering old contraption but your stop is still miles away. A frozen pork pie awaits you in the microwave and a post-menopausal wife is waiting for you on valium.

But there’s one saving grace and she’s seated right there in front of you. Dainty manicured fingers rest discretely in her lap. Well-formed breasts press outward against a white satin blouse. Two buttons have come provocatively undone to reveal more than just a hint of cleavage, a la Lolita. A short plaid skirt held by a gold kilt pin falls open like the slits up the Dragon Lady’s thighs in the Terry and the Pirates comics you used to read as a boy. That was a very long time ago. This little cupcake wouldn’t recognize Terry Lee or the Dragon Lady who are old enough to have been her great-grandparents had they ever lived. You can’t recall schoolgirls ever looking this good, well, not in your day, anyway.

Your eyes are drawn to a sculpted ivory ear that’s silver studded four times and lock of gleaming black hair that follows its curvature like an unsheathed scimitar, ready. Her perfume cuts through the bus stench, rising up into your nostrils then down into your briefs. You want to insert your long wet butterfly tongue into that youthful orifice to sip its nectar, maybe roll it around inside there a long while. You want to remove a few more buttons to release those perfect breasts with their marvelous pink nipples pointing to left and right. You want this girl. You want her right here on the rolling, bouncing, rush-hour bus. You want her so badly you’ve missed your stop.

Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, this object of your unspoken desire raises her liquid blue eyes to stare longingly into yours and whispers, “Would you like to take this seat, sir?”