Bus to Stanley

The bus to Stanley twists over and around the hills, and then along Repulse Bay. We will shop at the market, finding cheap ties we will give to friends back home and loose silk trousers we will wear around the house back in Canada. Months later, we will feel the silk trousers against our bare skin, and once again be enveloped in the smells from the meat shop where orange dusted chickens and rabbits hang in the window, again feel the wending of our bodies through a crowd. Once our shopping is finished, we will eat at a restaurant serving Australian pizza and hamburgers, which don’t taste too different from the pizza and hamburgers we are used to. We will each drink a can of Foster’s lager. On the way home on the bus, we will decide that tonight we will take the ferry over to Kowloon, and find the restaurant whose name we can’t remember where we had Peking duck last time. She is dull with sleepiness after the beer – she sleeps easily. I watch her face relax against my arm, eyes closed, as we descend toward the incredibly crowded streets below, where the cars are massed and move like corpuscles of mechanized blood.