Al Pal

Yesterday I was riding a bus when it braked suddenly to avoid hitting a rogue vehicle. So sudden was the stop that each denizen in motor looked up, startled. One, a man next to me, did not glance frontward like everyone else; he looked at me, and I looked back. Present in his expression was fright, and an instantaneous glimmer of excited hope. This jarring event tore a momentary rift in the familiar social bus climate. Here lay a gap in expectation for conversational apathy, a rare, fortuitous opportunity to speak a few inconsequential words to a stranger, an opportunity the man gobbled up.