Strange Times

It was late. Not that late, all things considered, but late enough that I wanted to go home and the bus system was doing its utmost to thwart me. I'd just gotten off work, black shirt tucked in to my black pants, streaked with stray nebulas of vanilla syrup and bleach. Occupational hazards of the closing barista. Regardless, I was in a decent mood as I walked down the block to my bus stop, undoing the buttons of my shirt as I went. I paid no mind to the February chill that punctuated the night breeze. Being born and raised in Vancouver means you get used to the cold after a while. Work shirt in tow, spring in my step, odd looks from the few pedestrians who couldn't reconcile the month with a t-shirt. I got to the bus stop and noticed a blind man standing there, a white guy, left hand clenched firmly on the leash of his seeing eye dog. The dog was so dark that I almost couldn't see it, camouflaged in the shadows of the bus shelter. I stood behind him, not wishing to trespass upon courtesy...when the bus showed up, I would let him get on first. There were a couple other tired denizens accumulated around the bus stop. A woman with a foam mattress tucked awkwardly in a camper bag, a Main street refugee blurring the line between haute couture and homelessness. An old Asian man sat on the bench, a skater teetering on the edge of his cigarette as the end burned an insignia into the night sky. I ignored them for the most part, isolated in my earbud empire, biding my time until the bus arrived. Fifteen minutes later, it did. And by some peculiar coincidence, some obscure, serendipitous twist of fate, there was another blind man on the bus. It was a black guy, led forward by a dog whiter than fresh snow, white as Scarface's vice. The driver held people back from exiting while this guy was led by his dog through the front door of the bus. It trotted along gregariously enough, until pausing, it noticed its opposite across from it. The white dog's hair bristled, as did its counterpart's, and next thing I knew, they had lunged at each other, pulling their wards violently as they found themselves locked in feral combat. Their barks pierced the silence of the night, jagged over the neutral hum of the engines lurking in the background. The blind men were balanced precariously over a dog fight, chromatic opposites, resembling some surreal yin-yang symbol. I could barely believe my eyes. Moments later, the fight had vanished from the dogs, their canine urges satisfied, confident in their dominance. The men parted ways, the only parties unaware of the acute visual irony of the scene they had just painted, neither the wiser as to what had just happened. I got on my bus feeling one step closer to having seen everything.