Driving a taxi is like watching eight movies all at once, constantly flickering back and forth between plots and characters with no discernable end in sight. Your evenings are filled with snippets of overheard conversation, brief but stale idle chatter and the same script to end it every time.
After a while the routes to most places become so familiar you begin to pay less and less attention to the roads and begin to notice everything else around you. Little glimpses of things you don't think you were ever meant to see - things that your passengers either don't notice or are somehow a part of.
For example a month or so ago when you were waiting for the lights to change and caught a glimpse of wild dogs chasing after a small deer further into a cul-de-sac. Just as the car behind you honked to get your attention as the lights changed, you saw them all change into children that stopped and stared right at you.
You notice that dogs are reluctant to go near you now.
There was also that time you were waiting near a pub for a customer who said they were "five minutes away"... they were always five minutes away. It was your last job of the night and you figured you may be there a while so you switched the car off and were about to pull out a newspaper when someone burst through the rear door of the pub and staggered into the closest alley that you just so happened to be outside of.
Your windows were up but you still heard the sound his skin made as he peeled it off to reveal scales.
Even as recently as yesterday you found yourself glancing up at the windows of Hotel Hallmarshe only to see a man on the phone, pacing between three windows agitatedly while an impossibly shaped shadowy figure walked three steps behind him.
You jolted in your seat when it pounced and forced your eyes to the road when it looked down at you.
After a while the routes to most places become so familiar you begin to pay less and less attention to the roads and begin to notice everything else around you. Little glimpses of things you don't think you were ever meant to see - things that your passengers either don't notice or are somehow a part of.
For example a month or so ago when you were waiting for the lights to change and caught a glimpse of wild dogs chasing after a small deer further into a cul-de-sac. Just as the car behind you honked to get your attention as the lights changed, you saw them all change into children that stopped and stared right at you.
You notice that dogs are reluctant to go near you now.
There was also that time you were waiting near a pub for a customer who said they were "five minutes away"... they were always five minutes away. It was your last job of the night and you figured you may be there a while so you switched the car off and were about to pull out a newspaper when someone burst through the rear door of the pub and staggered into the closest alley that you just so happened to be outside of.
Your windows were up but you still heard the sound his skin made as he peeled it off to reveal scales.
Even as recently as yesterday you found yourself glancing up at the windows of Hotel Hallmarshe only to see a man on the phone, pacing between three windows agitatedly while an impossibly shaped shadowy figure walked three steps behind him.
You jolted in your seat when it pounced and forced your eyes to the road when it looked down at you.
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