Also at http://www.redfez.net/fiction/434

Checkbook, cheap pens, one lipstick, no condoms. Neat hints of class tucked in: credit cards (3) in a leatherette billfold, cash enough for a quickie meal. And ambiguity: a wad of gum in a scrap that bears the distinctive print of The Wall Street Journal. many containers of pills. What's she got? AIDS or cancer maybe. Only a life-changing illness would merit this blatant carting around of meds. Drug dealer, no. This is a black sateen pocketbook on a golden chain with an old-fashioned pearl clasp at the top to snap it shut.

The eight plastic tubes with prescription labels are for the patient, Bessira Lin. Black, white, Asian, typo? A mix of aunts and uncles from Barbados and the Philippines and the north or the south of Ireland, some Ellis Island attempt to render a nervous mumble? The name means too much to give up a clue. The names of the drugs to be taken twice daily, thrice daily, as needed, after each meal, give the first solid information: he knows nothing of medicine.

No, her disease is not the awful thing. The awful thing -- lurch of the bus, near topple, pill containers all over the floor -- there's got to be something meaningful here. A woman's purse! Famed as a locus of revelatory detail. But he finds no welfare check or account of a 401K, no travel receipts, no cheap locket, no child's photograph. A comb with two hairs: length? color? dyed or straightened or curled? They drop to the littered floor.

He's a man on a bus. Young or old? Would he have seen wrinkled skin, callouses, dirty or tended nails had he noticed his hands while rifling the purse? Is he sure of being a man, the English collective masculine pronoun persisting as it does in this age of Ms., dowry murder, the veil? If he were to look at the bus window opposite, he'd have to report what he saw -- but it could be daytime and no reflection.

Violence would explain or resolve or distract. He might have slugged her, she him. The chain on the purse might be worn, the links twisted by some pain-causing use that would open faintly titillating doors and peg him, morally speaking, to a wall. He might find some less firmly pegging, less other-exculpating sign, violence so often obeying rules unnoticed by those safe. Maybe random. Random could be the ticket. He could leave the bus and turn to see a great spurt of blood on the advertisement along the side. She could have stepped off into traffic somehow, leaving him with her purse and a desperate hatred of memory.

After the end of the story he will exit the bus. He might see blood. He might not even look. He might have recovered his memory. He might take the purse to a pawnshop, or home to see whether the key fits -- key!

There have to be keys in this thing, maybe under the pills or slipped into the checkbook or way at the bottom where there ought to be scraps and mint-wrappers and pennies. A key in the purse could match the one he must have in his pocket and identify her as his wife, his roommate, his sister, his something. There might be a card to St. Jude or a rosary and he wind up sitting here paternostering or hailing the mother god. But there isn't. There's a lapful of junk, no doubt petrochemical plastics that won't for a thousand years be able to crumble to dust.