This Tuesday was a gloomy day. Clouds filled the sky, so far up as to be indistinguishable, turning the sky an even gray. Mist swirled through the streets. Passerby hurried along the damp sidewalks, heads pulled down to protect against the sporadic rain which spattered on their shoulders and on the hard, unyielding yellow roofs of the taxis. Traffic was light, and vehicles sped through the streets as if they, too, wanted to hurry up and get the day over with, to huddle around a fireplace and drink a glass of wine and sigh contentedly. The wheels of a passing van kicked up a wave of spray against a bus stop, but its inhabitants hardly flinched; it was exactly the kind of thing you’d expect on this Tuesday.

A young, dark-haired man with dull eyes and wearing a heavy coat stood up when the bus came. He stood meekly in line as some passengers shuffled off, then hurried up the steps when his turn came. He found a seat in the middle of the bus, surrounded by empty seats, and stared at the window, watching the moisture bead and flow down the reinforced glass. The doors closed and the bus accelerated; the crawling droplets of water changed course to take an angled path down to the bottom, where they joined those which had come before, indistinguishable in the pool between the window and the body of the bus. This reflection made him smile sadly, but no one else saw.

A woman across the aisle and a few seats back was talking loudly on her cell phone. Some problem with her kids, it sounded like; and certainly everyone on the bus could hear, if they chose. The words “custody” and “hourly rate” were repeated several times. A teenage girl with one earbud in turned around and gestured for her to be quiet, but her eyes were raised to the ceiling in exasperation as she railed about “that foolish, self-centered excuse for a man,” and she didn’t notice. No one was listening anyway.

A quiet sigh went unheard by most. The old man shifted uncomfortably in his tired-looking suit, casting accusing glances at the rain. A newspaper lay neatly folded in his lap. If anyone had cared to look, they might have noticed the highlighted passages of the Financial section, the angry notes in the margins of Opinion, a lonely smiley face next to one of the daily comics. A sheaf of forms stuck out of his pocket; he fiddled with his tie.

Even the buildings looked sad. The facades dripped with accumulated moisture. Chipped paint was characteristic of the worn-out buildings the bus sputtered past. The lights blazed weakly out all the windows of a tall insurance building; across the street, two-thirds of a department store was dark. A wrinkled poster outside a squat theater advertised to the sparsely populated sidewalk a blockbuster, “opening this Tuesday.” Two people stood in line.

The bus picked up a few more people as it plunged deeper into the city. Someone sat in front of the young, dark-haired man; he eyed their yellow hat suspiciously. The woman lost her signal and put down her phone, muttering angrily to herself and promising retribution. The old man leaned back and closed his eyes; the teenager put her other earbud in. For a few moments the only sounds were the tinny impacts of raindrops over their heads and the wheels’ whoosh and zoom through the puddle-thronged streets. The bus screeched to a halt by the next stop; a couple got on, talking animatedly, but when they sat down next to each other their conversation died and they avoided eye contact. The bus pulled out again; for once, all the lights were green.

The mousy and unkempt hair of the driver swayed as he shook his head and blinked his eyes. He was tired and eager to be home. This particular Tuesday had been a particularly long day, and he wanted nothing more than to get home early and fall asleep in front of the TV, forgetting the weariness and stress of the day. He tried not to worry about whispers of budget cuts in the news. An untouched magazine, three days old, lay next to his seat. He didn’t look at it, just kept his eyes on the road as he leaned forward blearily and put a little more pressure on the accelerator than he was used to. He didn’t see the little red sports car running the dim red light until it was half an instant too late.

He swerved; the bus tilted. Someone screamed; there was a collision.

“Bus crash this Tuesday kills 12, injures 17,” a headline in small print on the bottom-right corner of the Sunday paper read, “investigation ongoing.”