Ladybug ladybug

The man beside me smells strongly of tobacco, that particular kind of tobacco that has an acrid odour that eats its way up into your nostrils. I don't know what he looks like.

In front of me, a girl and and her grandmother have dispensed with the amicable pretenses that had coloured their conversation while the friendly old lady had been sitting near them on the bus and have now begun nattering back and forth between them about which one was an idiot for losing grandma's sunglasses.

Grandma can't be much older than my mother, but her face is crisscrossed with wrinkles. Life in Maple Ridge seems to age women prematurely.

On my lap rests a beaten copy of The Bell Jar, out from the library. In the margins, someone has scrawled "why do you want to keep me alive?!?" and on the next page, "I want to DIE" and the bathos of it irritates me. I make a mental note to erase it before I take it back. Sylvia Plath is not postsecret, people.

My eyes float down past my knees, to where the harness aparatus for securing wheelchairs is lying crumpled under the seat of the girl and her grandmother.

"No, grandma! It's a ladybug!" But the granddaughter is too late. I look up to see the helpless creature crunch against the window under grandma's manicured finger before she flicks it to the floor.