Vagabonds, hobos, derelicts and the deranged all seemed to find their way onto the same bus that he happened to be riding. An enormously fat woman with a proportionately fat toddler, her face a squab of veins and blotches, pressed into the seat next to him, her child screeching like a banshee. Or a bawdy woman with chicken scratches on her arms, nodding back and forth, her neck seemingly incapable of supporting the weight of her head. A fancy man in a fancy hat, teeth the colour of corn, needling the bawdy woman with the screw of his elbow. A traffic jam of perambulators and baby carriages, old people shuffling behind walkers made from tube steel, leatherette and Velcro, tires splayed through to the rim. And all that hacking and coughing, and the odor of peppermints, clothes recently unpacked from mothballs, mildew, and the blight of necrotic flesh. He thought of them, all of them, as dogs, creatures lacking in self-consciousness and purpose. The unprincipled fat woman, even though the sight of her made him sick with dread, he would eat, boiling her with leeks and garlic, making sure to skim the oily fat from the top of the simmer. He imagined there were dogs that size, even though he had never seen one, or known someone who had.
