The little girl in purple galoshes started the conversation. I don’t talk to folks at the bus stop. I don’t talk to folks on the bus. Most times it just leads chatter and nonsense and I’d rather take a nap. We weren’t making eye contact. She just started talking. I’m used to this from the homeless–the spontaneous questions, the abrupt inquiries–not from children. She could have been a teenager. I wasn’t really looking.
She asked me if I knew all the ways that a sailor could die on a submarine.
I said there were hundreds if you included all the possibilities of one sailor murdering another.
That’s not what I mean, she said. Not murder. More like hitting an iceberg.
Blown up by a torpedo from another submarine, I said. That’s two.
Crash, explosion, she said, counting on her fingers. A leak…
You’re talking about drowning, really. If a submarine hits an iceberg it’s going to spring a leak and the sailors will drown.
So, drowning and explosion, she said. I guess an explosion means dying by fire.
There’s also implosion, I added. That’s when it gets crushed from the all the pressure. That can happen if it goes too deep or loses pressure inside.
That’s three, she said. What’s it called when they run out of air?
Soffocate.
So four, she said. I bet there’s another.
The bus came, and I didn’t get on. She boarded and I saw that her galoshes were more pink than purple. She was already talking to a woman beside her.
I walked to the next stop and thought of two more .
