He is not trying to make a million dollars. He is not going to buy a new car. He is thinking about downsizing apartments. If he writes in a small room, the ideas in his head will stay close-by and never evaporate into the cold. Even thin, peeling walls can keep his memories penned in like sheep. He eats crackers and soft white cheese. He wishes he had a hose running with Diet Coke that snaked all the way to his desk. 

Most nights nothing is written. 

He wakes up when the sun is already comfortable in the sky. It takes him an hour to make coffee and another to make breakfast. The silence in his apartment is preferable. He moves slowly when there is no music playing, like a dance he choreographed on his first day on the job: a devoted laying out of the clothes before wearing, ten minutes sitting on the edge of the bed with eyes closed, crossing oneself with a simpleness of heart usually only found in evergreen trees. 

He loves his standard-issue hat. It is dry-cleaned every two weeks. His mother taught him to dress for the job he wants, not the job he has. But, blessedly, for him they are the same. No one has asked him outright if he likes driving the bus but he does. He thinks it is like steering a ship on the ocean. The brakes hiss like waves breaking on the bow. It feels especially familiar to sailing when it rains and he hunches over the steering wheel to peer out the windshield beaten by the wipers.

Anecdotes, like dewdrops, show up for him to collect. 

My father was struck by a firetruck while he was bicycling home from work, one female passenger says. I have not had a reason to call the fire department in my life and I hope I never do. I don’t want their money or their help if I can avoid it. 

He overhears her story but does not react. 

He deposits his keys on their ring with a satisfying jingle. He hurries to his desk. In his novel, the narrator finally explains what happened to his father. He was struck by a firetruck–no really. One more reason to despise paying taxes, as if we need another. The government refused to cover medical costs, leading to financial ruin and government mistrust. The narrator, a bus driver, explains all this to a reporter; the fictional Transport Workers Union has gone on strike.

He leans back in his writing chair. He lets go of a long breath. The moon is out now and is the only light in his apartment. It has grown dark since he sat at his desk. A memory comes to him. Another night that he spent watching the moon, from his roof, burning with worry, waiting for a reply to an email confessing love to a friend of ten years. It was warm out then and the air smelled sweet from the mulberry tree on the street below. Rotting berries dropped to the sidewalk and were squashed to purple pulp.

His eyes well with tears anytime he walks under mulberry trees in the summertime. 

The narrator in his novel loves mulberries, but it is winter. 

His nights are different now that he is older. He does not miss his smoking habit. He does not miss his drinking buddies, although he remembers them with a kind of fondness that makes him glad they met. They appear in his novel now, too. He sits on his couch in the near-dark and makes a game of who he can remember. He rereads his novel to remember them, the stories he heard and lived, woven in. It makes him feel that his novel will be important to someone if he can finish it. If he had children he would have liked for them to read it. 

He sleeps when he’s burnt all his midnight oil. 

He dreams he is on the moon. He crosses a lunar sea in a rowboat that glides on air. Behind him is a net which catches rocks glowing with blue light. They begin trailing his boat and making metallic rattling sounds. Suddenly the rocks take a rounded shape. Like beaded water caught on a spiderweb. Dew. What is leftover from the night. 

When he wakes, his room is cold. It has snowed deeply. His bus route will be canceled or delayed.

He walks to the coffee shop. On his way, he passes a car wrecked against a pole. The ice has turned dark from all the boots pounding it. An ambulance waits nearby and there are many loud voices but none are hurried. Through the cracked windshield, the car looks like a vacant house. 

Later he reads that a young mother died in the crash. 

He cannot write until it is dark. He recreates the crash scene in the next chapter of his novel. He cannot bear to kill a young mother. It is far too much, too dramatic. Instead the car was driven by someone despised–but this does not feel right either. Most villains do not die in car wrecks. They live long lives. 

He deletes and averts the crash. There is no icy patch. 

His narrator walks down an empty street, calm but for the falling snowflakes. He wishes the union were not striking. He misses the passengers that stomp onto the bus each day, scratching ice off of their shoes, or hauling plastic bags stretched at the handle, or carrying steaming take-out boxes.

He tires of writing and moves to the couch, under a blanket. He prays briefly for the safety of those driving in the snow. He wonders whether he will finish his novel but decides that he will be content to write it for the rest of his life and he falls asleep under the blue, waxing moon.