The number forty-seven bus was doing what the number forty-seven bus always did during the evening rush—it was packed so tight that breathing felt like a strategic consideration.

Marcus Chen stood near the window on one of the aisle seats, his right leg extended slightly in front of him in a way that had become second nature over the past eighteen months. The tattoo on his neck—a small phoenix rising from flames, something he’d gotten when he was seventeen and stupid—was visible to anyone who bothered to look, which apparently most people did. The one on his left forearm was a map of constellations, done by an artist in Portland who’d understood exactly what Marcus was trying to say: I’m still here. I’m still looking up.

Ezoic
He wasn’t looking up now, though. He was looking straight ahead, at nothing in particular, at the kind of middle distance that people adopted when they wanted to be left alone in public.

The bus smelled like the combination of things that all city buses smelled like—something between exhaust fumes and the particular weariness of people who’d been working since before dawn. An elderly couple was sitting a few rows back, having a conversation about grocery prices that had apparently been ongoing for several minutes. Two teenagers in the back were laughing about something on a phone screen. A man in a suit was reading something on his tablet, his briefcase balanced carefully against his knee.

Ezoic
It was a Tuesday evening in late September in Portland, Oregon. The kind of evening where the weather couldn’t decide if it wanted to be summer or fall, so it was doing both simultaneously.

Marcus was tired.

Not the kind of tired that sleep could fix—he’d learned that distinction the hard way over the past year and a half. This was the kind of tired that came from living in a body that didn’t match the one he remembered having, from navigating a world that suddenly felt engineered for people who had two functioning legs and all the assumptions that came with them.

Ezoic
He was headed home from his shift at the grocery store, where he’d spent eight hours stocking shelves and helping customers find products they could’ve found themselves if they’d bothered to read the signs. His manager was decent enough. The job paid twelve dollars an hour and covered his share of the rent on a one-bedroom apartment he shared with his brother in Northeast Portland. It wasn’t the life he’d imagined having at eighteen, but then again, losing your right leg below the knee in a motorcycle accident tended to revise your life expectations pretty significantly.

The bus lurched slightly as it hit a pothole.