Free & Pricey

Published July 16, 2009

I'm a little bit self-conscious about bothering you with photos of commonplace explosions, but then again I just love how these turned out, and I had a lot of fun playing with exposures to get them to turn out this way.

These were actually taken on July 3rd at a PawSox game, after which we had a bit of additional excitement: Having walked about a mile to the nearest bus stop still in service for the night, we still had half an hour to wait until the 11:32pm bus came. There was a large, semi enclosed area full of benches upon which were seated many disadvantaged looking people. Standing immediately outside the area was a man in a black jacket who was tending to his brand new bicycle, complete with promotional cards still stuck in the spokes. We were standing off to the side, conversing in a semi-circle when the bike-man came over to us. He started to give us a rundown about how he was conducting "informal research" and wanted to gauge our reaction to something, at which point we noticed he had held out a concealed hand underneath his loose jacket. He assured us that it was nothing dangerous or obscene, but that didn't stop any of us from fearing the worst. "No thanks," I said as forcefully as I could muster, which barely seemed to deter him as he kept trying to persuade us to participate. "Please, Leave Us Alone," I said. And he did. He walked away exhasperated as if we had offended him.

I felt a little bad about being somewhat impolite, (though I did say please and thanks,) but it's hard to feel much sympathy for someone who fails to understand that hiding something under your coat in the middle of night and weilding it to strangers could be perceived as threatening.

He got on the bus with us after loading his bike on front, and chose to sit right across the aisle. Luckily he got off before we did and everybody went about their merry way. There were a few other details such as chatty drunk folk, cursing in Hindi, a stolen/lost/found(?) cell phone, and an off-kilter bus driver, but I'll let other people tell those stories.

FLASH FICTION FRIDAY RETURNS TOMORROW! Look out for it.