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“By the way, she was going on a date,” Michael remarked, standing behind Mary. “And the old lady is going home. She would have washed herself, and that’s fine, and then you might have ruined girl’s life…”
“How was I to know?”
“But you have, you have to know. In such cases, you need to stop the time for a moment, people won’t even notice, and find out about everyone, if you were going to help the gra
y.”
Mary bit her lip and lowered her head in frustration. In the meantime, the woman whose fish made all split in the tram began yelling at the already upset girl, saying that she was “guilty” that the fish “ran away” from the owner.
“Do you still think that you can hear something useful from them?”
Mary lost her heart completely.
“Sometimes it doesn’t matter what they say to you, it’s not people who give a clue in unawareness. We need a push to understand by ourselves, to reach something: decisions, thoughts.”
Somewhere at the very begi
ing of the tram, next to the driver’s cabin, despite what was happening around and considering it all to be kind of a women game, which was partly true, two retirees were discussing something occasionally glancing at the young girls who had given up their seats a few minutes earlier. Checking up on the length of their legs and miniskirts, old men were eagerly discussing political squabbles. One of them, with foam at the mouth was proving the correctness of the current president political decisions, the other – of his opponent. Bringing into the conversation third-party politicians, often quite out of place, they sincerely believed that they understood the topic of their conversation more than the politicians under discussion. Soon they had a little dust-up on the ground of the quoted speech of one of the politicians.
There was nothing to argue about with his opponent: the words were correct, but their meaning was false and he didn’t know how to prove this falsehood. So they were arguing for a long time and others could hear their individual remarks and quotes of famous political figures.
Soon a few more voices joined their vivid conversation. One problem: they often confused the words of politicians with reality and got mixed up with quotations and their authors. It was a kind of tram hodgepodge, where it wasn’t clear who was right and who was wrong. Yet, it didn’t matter, as it turned out to be much more important to show the degree of their awareness in the political world, where politicians themselves are not always sufficiently aware of who said what and how their people live.
Absolutely bewildered, Mary tried to distinguish at least one decent idea, phrase, or even a word in this beehive. But she failed. The old men at the driver’s cab continued to argue, not knowing what they were talking about. The woman with a fish, or rather, already without a fish, was still scolding the young girl for the losses to her family budget in the form of the long gone fish, which, by the way, was dragged off by one of the homeless who was riding in the same tram (he dodged the fare, of course). The controller, who entered the tram to check whether all the passengers had tickets, was shouting loudly, trying to calm the owner of the fish and the conscientious girl who burst in tears without going on her date. Nobody knows whether this had ruined her life or saved the soul from incurable pain.
A little distance away, the old lady was trying to make a pregnant woman stand up and give up her seat. She was shaming her and remembering out loud the good old days when the youth was better just because the old lady was a part of it herself.
Still further, little scamps were drawing on the seats with a marker, thinking that it was the modern trend of a great visual art, old as time.
And, finally, in the very corner of the tram, at the entrance, two people with bright leaflets were talking to one couple about the impending “end of the world”. And the person who was watching the happenings from the side with a smile was that same girl that Mary had just noticed, but already without a blue scarf.
“So that's why we are in this particular tram!” She exclaimed, turning her face to Michael. “You knew it!”
The silence reigned. Mary looked around in surprise, realizing that the passengers couldn’t hear her. The noise actually resumed, and now that girl was staring at them gloomily, no longer smiling.
“Why does she always get upset when she sees us?”
“She’s a human... We’re disrupting her life.”
“But we’re just living our lives!” Angel shrugged her shoulders bewilderedly.
“There’s a lot you don’t know. My chief wants to get not only her soul, but all of her, as he believes she’s the only acceptable candidate for the continuation of his line.”