Icicles

My fingers tingle and burn in the cold as I fumble with my phone, trying to see when my next bus will come. My breaths hang in the cold, dry, air like soft clouds obscuring the screen in front of me. The air tingles and tickles in my nose like a trapped sneeze and I tuck my hands back in to my gloves to warm them.

The breeze weaves through the knit of my hat, chilling my scalp with its icy fingers and I step into the bus shelter to get out of the wind.

There are other fellow travellers inside already, some more prepared for the weather than others as I eyed someone’s sneakers and another person who had their hood pulled up over their bare head.

At first it was quiet and calm, each of us minding our own business, lost in our thoughts or caught up in a gentle conversation with a loved one. But as time wears on and the bus seems delayed, we all start to wiggle and shuffle and stamp our feet.

“Why is it always on the coldest day of the year it’s late?”

I look up at the sapphire blue sky, unblemished by clouds, looking as if it would shatter if it was tapped a little too hard. It looked as brittle as the icicles that hang from the bus shelter after a freeze.

There was glints of red that twinkled through the glassy icicles and a shadow passed across my vision. Our bus had arrived.

Shivering and stamping our feet we formed a disorderly line, impatient to get out of the cold.

The bus lurched off with us new passengers and a new day begins.