The silvery moon lights the sky as I offload from the drunken bus. Only two remain, Kendra, who starred in Planet Buzzkill, and a skinny McDonald's employees coming home from work. Three years ago they would have had ten peers for company. The white squirrel—a chattering shame to my race—scampers off ahead as the big, lumbering, lantern-jawed brute who redeems my sissy race with every slouch-shouldered step, brushes by me like a phantom, walking off into a darkly shadowed neighborhood that is not safe by day. Ah, to be him again, to be feared by that which hates and hunts you, would be nice. If only there were no law, no obscene civilization, a hundred of him with clubs could clear this entire peninsula of its 10,000 imported hoodrats in an week.

Uncharacteristically, the bus stop is full across the way, where Eunice, the African, Christian housekeeper, normally stands in hopes that I will not pass her by and leave her alone to the feral blacks of this land. Across the street stand five beings in various stages of decay: a big older man, with an employment badge of some kind slung from his neck keeps his distance from the two skulking yos and two cussing hos that occupy the shelter. These are apparently not waiting on a bus, just hanging about.

The man waits for the #24, which means another 45 minutes with these scum.

I stand off from him as he stands off from them.

Eunice paces under the shelter where I offloaded, suspicious of these savages and pacing nervously, looking over her shoulder to see if the #4 is coming so that she can make her way across to this stop before it turns.

Behind me someone shuffles on the asphalt of the Aldi's Food Market: a black as coal, hulking man in his early twenties, lean and muscular under a huge winter coat paces in a seething rage or nervous apprehension—I cannot tell. Every three paces of his apish gait back and forth behind the wall and shrubs, he stops, grabs the frame of the broken shopping cart over which he seems to prowl possessively, and snaps off a piece.

What an interesting fellow.

The man next to me, light-skinned and nearing sixty, breaks into a beading sweat as he mumbles to himself, "Foty-five minutes with dese fools!"

The loud wench under the shelter chants a rap about "sucking niցցer dicks" as another savage pats the shelter siding like a drum kit and yet another spits loudly onto the sidewalk.

Cinch, the talkative 7-11 clerk, gets off the #23 in time to join Eunice, who greets him warmly—her fetish for white men confirmed. His big voice, reverberating in his thin skull, can be heard for a quarter mile in conversational tone. He is a public service of the night, devoting all of his oratory to weather reports and bus scheduling concerns. One can literally stand across the street from him while he chatters to Eunice and know what busses are running late, the purpose behind the shelters, and schedules, the geometry of bus line linkage, the upcoming scheduling changes, boarding regulations, etc. Where Big Head Tweet confines his bus prediction art to silent calculations and amazed and soft spoken conclusions, Cinch is a literal herald of mass transit information.

My question as to whether or not the skittish home boys back in the city were fearful of my creeping person or were just practicing herd selection in a way calculated to minimize their being cut out by predators, is answered.

Eunice has cut herself out of the black pack so that some white man in possession of a vestige of his ancestors' honor might stand by her.

The big man next to me has removed himself from the obvious knot of trouble to his left.

The seething beast over my shoulder, seemingly incapable of abiding the fools at the shelter, tears apart a shopping cart instead.

Herd selection is a simple strategy by which individuals join with those whom they sense will provide protection or minimize attention, and separate from those who they sense will draw attention or perhaps prove a threat themselves.

I enjoy this brief, atomized respite from the sick world and soon board with Eunice and Cinch as the others all seem panicked at our leaving, except, that is, for the beast man behind the bus stop still breaking that shopping cart apart with his big black hands...

I sit across from Eunice, next to the object of her horror, a white junky with a bag of Cheetos in one hand and three of the crispy delectables in the other, forever orbiting his mouth as he sways and nods, like a space craft with malfunctioning navigation program trying unsuccessfully to doc with the space station represented by that yawning mouth in the gaunt head.

Five minutes later, the three lost Cheetos still unconsumed, I offload to the relative serenity of meaningless toil.

A Partial Exhumation of the American Dream