"Tickets! Tickets for inspection!"
The grey-haired woman in the third row squirms in her
seat, fumbles with her purse, and finally extracts her green Rav Kav bus card. Avshalom
senses she's hiding something. His suspicions are confirmed when he presses her
card to his handheld reader.
"You didn't pay," he tells her.
"What?" she asks in Russian.
"Rav Kav—empty," he replies in accented,
imperfect Russian. This surprises her, he can see. She isn't expecting a
religious, Sephardic, slightly overweight, somewhat disheveled ticket inspector
to answer her in her native tongue. "Get off bus," he says.
"But I paid!" Her face reddens in
embarrassment as she pushes past the commuters standing near the door. "I
paid!" She steps down to the sidewalk. The door whooshes closed behind her
and the bus pulls away from the stop.
Read the rest of the story on DoubleSpeak.
Photo by Bahnfrend and used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
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