↭ -- My muse is lost and stops to ask your muse for directions.
Help, was an asking work.
'Do you need help?' was something people asked when you couldn't do something. A lot of people said those words but Seungho was twenty-six years and one-hundred and ninety-eight days old. Walking the streets of the city that he called home was something he had done long before anyone had noticed the boy with clothes worn down like soft flannel over his joints and dirt-stained sneakers bearing holes that showed off socks that once might have been white.
If you asked Seungho where he lived he would answer with 'Chicken man's shop', but if you asked where home was, he would answer 'here.' He knew his daily route like he knew inane facts about the black and white bears he loved so much. He knew each turn like he knew each and every one of the individual notes of Mozart's Piano Sonata in C. He knew exactly which bus, and which color line took you where (red was home, blue was to the park, yellow to the fountain downtown), but today, something had gone wrong.
The driver was wrong today, an unfamiliar face with yellow teeth and a pig nose and splotchy hands that would not let him pass without a ticket. "No ticket, Seungho ride. Seungho always ride," he had tried to explain, for his caretaker paid the bus fares in advance to make it easier, but he doors snapped closed like a crocodile's mouth and he breathed in the foul smell of exhaust that the bus farted out the back instead of the clean air conditioning it breathed inside. And he was left on the sidewalk with no way of going home.
"Help," he blurted to no one in particular, as he followed the departing vehicle for a few moments before his feet turned and brought him back around the bus stop in an oval path of pacing. "Help... bus gone. Bus gone."
