His Why to Her How

Injecting the moment with an acid-trip visual, she sewed him in threads of blue and green into the hole of her sweater. August or not, she kept her arms covered, hiding the cut marks, the bruises, the scars. He knew it and tried to explain his why, as he offered up a quasi-mess kit, replete with needle, thread, and bandages.

 “Cuz you never know,” he told her, handing over the plastic bag.

The two, sharing a polyester bus seat and the stale air that came with recirculated coughs and sweat, they were company for the next twelve hours as the Greyhound covered ground from Pittsburg to Chicago. She didn’t ask his motive, and he didn’t ask about the hole in her sweater.

His why-why-why talk rambled over the hills of Pennsylvania into the flat middle land of Columbus, Ohio, where the bus pulled in to refuel.

“I’m going to stretch my legs,” she told him, trying to explain her how to his why.

But neither of them listened.

And as the bus pulled away while she dawdled inside the station, fingering worn postcards and wondering her future, she realized she never learned his name.