The Crone

Slowly the old crone unfurled her hand from around the bus seat.  Everyone had stopped talking but there was still much volume coming from the sound of the engine.  She got up and walked slowly to the bus driver who was waiting diligently at the stop she had requested.

She spoke.

'You and I, we're exceptional people, we live in this humdrum world. Sure, we are droplets in the world of consciousness but there's something different about us.'

The bus driver looked through the bulletproof plastic which separated them and studied her face.  Her skin was spectacularly flaccid; cloth of jaundice and grey swathed over her bone structure, glistening with silver-tipped iridescence.  She had an unperturbed youthful look still chomping from within.  A wide, ridiculous grin of ceramic dentures jutted from behind the loose crepe of her lips.

'Many people don't believe in it anymore; the magic'

A dozen or so people could hear the woman.  

'Oi, get off the bloody bus, you old crank!' scorned a man a quarter of the way down the alley.
'Get a grip woman, move your rusty hips back to the morgue' said another.
A few of the people sneered, enjoying the carnival of the hubbub.

The woman turned to the congregation:

'Look at my claw, crippled from the miserable days I spent working to make you curtains and soft furnishings, your baby clothes and personal effects.  Look at the bus driver, with his one big leg, pumping the guts of this bus, carrying beggars, workers and the-like through the city.  And all you can do is scorn with porcine logic, round a trough of swill!'
The voices died down a little, to a mild suburban-summer level of sound.  With that the old lady edged slowly off the bus.

Moving little else apart from his head the driver watched the little crooked figure dismounting the bus, before pulling the hydraulic door mechanism behind her.

The driver revved away with volume, pumping the clutch with his fat leg.