The Memoirs of Dimo

    I met Calliope in the subway. She stood in front of a brightly colored map, singing. In London there are a lot of strange things to see. I suppose in the long years I had lived in that city I had become somewhat desensitized to the generally abnormal because neither her bright orange hair nor her long rainbow plastic trench coat and mismatched boots or even the old unlit brass kerosene lantern she held in her hand seem overly odd. But she was strange and judging by the people stopping and staring, I wasn't the only one who thought so.
    You see, the subway is a universally depressing place. Wherever you go a subway is always a smelly, dirty, harshly lit place. Even when dancers or street performers turn on radios and perform for gathering crowds the gloom hardly lifts. But Calliope was standing there, bright colors appearing washed out in the bright white fluorescents, comparing a map drawn in crayon on what appeared to be the country's largest napkin to the one on the wall, smiling, and, most irrationally of all, singing.
    After high school and before college I traveled the country actively seeking the frightening, abnormal, noteworthy, and the just plain strange. Oddities have always intrigued me. Calliope was the oddest person I had ever seen so it should come as no surprise that she intrigued me to no end. Unable to quell my curiosity, I approached her.

She failed to notice my presence.