No trouble finding a spot on the bus today. No trouble any day, now. I'm by myself, at the window seat, in the oh-so-clean compartment; the area is spotless, all gleaming chrome and plastic, untouched by human hands. I stare out into the city, which is also immaculate, untainted as some would say, and that thought churns in my belly. I turn to see my own visage greet me in a gleaming pole; I'm almost startled. Somehow, distorted, my face might be someone else's, be one of them, even.
                    How long has it been? Well, there wasn't an exact date, was there? It had been a gradual process, a thinning out. Lord, now I'm using the politicians' terminology. Their placid euphemisms for genocide. That's what it was: murder, killing, death, not a thinning out. Now, it's only us, no more of them.
                    I look back out my window, but what I see is my face reflected therein. I turn away and try not to think about anything. Just wait for my stop.
                    I collect my hat and briefcase and disembark onto the almost empty street. I try to not look down the street to where the newsstand had been. I'm usually more careful as to where my eye is allowed to roam. I look to where it had been and can almost feel the press of the throng. Almost, but not really. Just a memory, just an impressionistic blur.
                    How long had it been? The dirt and the smells and the people are all gone, and yet I can still see the old man at the news stand. He was small, sprightly for his years, with a huge smiling mouth, and though unbelievably wrinkled, his dark skin practically glowed on his smooth, bald head. I bought my paper there every morning, chatted with the old man. He owned the stand and was very proud of it. He had come from far away and had started here with nothing. His wife had passed on, but he had two children.
                    Was he a friend? I don't know. Maybe not, but I liked him, his lilting voice, the funny smell of his imported tobacco. And when someone painted something horrible on his stall, I was afraid for him. But I was also afraid to say or do anything about it. Then one morning it was gone, burned down, a vile epithet spray-painted on the wall where his booth once stood. I never saw the old man again.
                    Now, there are no traces that the newsstand had ever been there. Spotless.
                    I go up to my office and sadly view the twelve desks symmetrically arranged in three rows of four. It is a cold and sterile atmosphere. And I sit in this office built for a dozen clerks, but there is only two of us now. I'm left with Pantin, whom I always disliked, anyway. I'd be happy to see him gone. But not like that. Not even Pantin.
                    I liked most of them, really, my now-gone co-workers. I had nothing against their kind. There was the woman who used to sit by the window. Had an odd name, can't recall it. Pakistani, I believe. She loved to comment on the weather each morning, repeating the same banal phrase to each one of us as we came in. It became a joke to the rest of us. “It's very sunny today.” “It's cloudy.”
                    She was the first to go.
                    Then over the weeks and months, one by one, they just wouldn't show up. Couldn't show up. Taken away. Until they were all gone. Where are they? The news just glosses it over. But one hears things, the hints of camps and unholy factories with unspeakable purposes. What happened to all of them? Like most of my station, I honestly don't think I want to know. I sit at my desk and compute. At least I no longer have to hear Pantin's comments about "them", as there are no more of them to comment upon.
                    No more.
                    The day passes. I ignore Pantin and concentrate on my work.
                    I sit on the bus in the twilight and look out on the near-empty utopia. After the cleansing... No, not "the cleansing", damn it. The murder. The genocide. After the killing, the politicians claimed there was almost no crime, no one on the dole; a great new age had begun. But the golden age has already ended. Now they look for a new scapegoat, a new bogeyman to terrorize the populace into submission. That never seems to change.
                    Why didn't I try to stop them? Oh, some did. And I admired them from afar. But I didn't want to be branded a traitor to my own, to share the fate of the "cleansed". I capitulated. I hid my feelings, what I know deep inside to be the truth, out of fear. I let the demagogues and bullies take over.
                    I sit on an empty bus and wish I could do something. I wish I could cry. And I wonder how I can ever look myself in the face, even if that face is merely plastic.
                    Oh, God, I miss mankind.