the boxer
an excerpt

The bus was full; they stood, hanging for dear life to the bars jutting out from the ceiling like the collapsed ribs of a strange animal. As they traveled through the village, they passed a multitude of people engaged in surprisingly productive activities through the snow and cold; fixing their roofs, reinforcing their windows and doors, hurrying home from the winter sales.

"Man, it looks like it's gonna be a cold one," Kai said.

Yet the boxer remembered that Kai chopped wood and shoveled snow and went hunting with such great passion that, from a distance, looking at him, one might think he was burning with love.

"Do you hate winter?" the boxer asked.

"No," Kai said, "I love winter. It reminds me of summer."

But summer was hot, and winter was cold. The boxer could not reconciliate such extremes with one another.

"If there was no winter, it would always be hot," Kai said. "After a few years, everyone would forget what's so special about having hot weather, since it happens all the time... And summer would stop being a special season."

"But I also like winter because it is winter," he added, after some thought.

The next stop was Kai's; he barged through the crowd around the door, hopped down the steps and shouted goodbye before the door shut again. Left on the bus, the boxer looked at the tired people crowded around him, their grey faces, cold fingers gripping the bars for support. None of them seemed alive; if the doors had opened and they had all one by one filtered out and stepped down the steps and off the edge of a cliff, he decided, he would just sit down on any seats they had just vacated, close his eyes, and wait for his stop.