Marketplace

The exhaust came off a bus idling near a tram stop, thick and warm, nothing like the salt air I know by heart from the Tagus river in Lisbon, where I live. It should have been unremarkable, this city runs on diesel the way it runs on tile and fado, but it carried me three days back, whole and specific, to the same stretch of riverbank where I had stood worn down past the point of words.