Chapter 57: Bwang-so Frog and Twenty-Six Animals
The morning commute. London is a city bustling with noise from dawn.
Diligent housekeepers swept and scrubbed their homes inside and out before their masters even stirred, emptying buckets of dirty mop water out of windows.
Invariably, it was the most industrious laborers who caught these impromptu showers. The unfortunate worker whose clothes were soaked for no fault of his own would look up and hurl curses skyward, but to no avail. Eventually, he would resign himself to the day’s misfortune and trudge onward.
A laborer’s morning is sparse. He queued at a stall selling green apples, and when his turn came, placed a coin down and received one small, misshapen fruit. Beside the queue lay a discarded skeletal apple core, with a line of ants marching across it.
A coachman, seeing his horse attempt to snatch up the apple core, mistook the movement for his drowsy steed nodding off and yanked the reins with a sharp “Whoa!” Nearby, a lamplighter with his long pole slung over his shoulder ambled slowly, unleashing a cavernous yawn.
London’s heart beat like an overwound clockwork mechanism, with everything moving ceaselessly along its predetermined path. Nothing stood still.
Only I disrupted the flow, leaning against a wall at a street corner like a jutting stone.
A newspaper was tucked into my side, purchased barely ten minutes ago. I hadn’t yet unfolded it to discover its contents. The fresh scent of ink, newly pressed from the printing machine, teased my intellectual curiosity.
Yet instead of reading the paper, I scrutinized the all-too-familiar street with an almost manic attention.