Of Evil and Bus Stops

The bus stop was evil. I walked an extra five blocks every morning in order to avoid it. It was on the corner of 10th, and I would loop around the block to 11th, past the old empty Victorian house, and finally back to tenth where a non-evil bus stop resided. When asked what about it was evil, I came up blank. No upside-down pentagrams or dried blood adorned its walls--it was physically exactly as vile as every other public structure in the city. It had the same crooked blue pole and peeling out-of-date informative stickers.

Nor was it a gut reaction. No nameless fear or anything like that. I didn't feel any twisting darkness in my heart. It was just a knowledge, I guess. Solid to the point that one wouldn't really even think of questioning it. Like how I know soup is made better with the inclusion of salt.

I couldn't tell you why, but it was a property of the universe that the bus stop wished us all ill.

My friends tell me I'm anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, and that there's probably a disorder for that. I should look it up, they tell me.

I'm never actively afraid, you understand. I know it's evil, and it wants to get me, and so I don't like to be near it. But it is, after all, a bus stop. It doesn't exactly loom large on the scale of fine motor control, and I'm not the sort to believe in magic. An angry flea could do me more injury.

Still, it's hard to feel comfortable with it standing there out in the open. No sign or anything to warn people away. After my letters to City Hall were met with no response, I forced myself within the block to post signs of my own.

I guess people tear them down, after mocking me relentlessly in a combination of sharpie, pencil, and knife-scratches.

I guess people don't like those trying to keep them safe.