like lady liberty

Train doors open and loud brash slippers clamber towards the seat across me. I look up at once, on guard. The first thing I notice is the giant white paper cone; long, thick, dark green stems with fresh slender leaves peek out from the slit. The middle-aged, incredibly tanned woman struggles with the metre-long cone and plops down, her two bulky red plastic bags carelessly dropped on the adjacent seat. Bottles of fresh milk, packets of salt or sugar. "谢谢光临," the plastic bags say in serif font. Two seconds of silence. The woman tries to set the clumsy cone in a more comfortable position - between her legs, beside her thighs.  Paper crinkling. Her left hand takes it from her right, and she decides to hold it upright, almost austere if you ignored her slouch and her legs spread comfortably apart. You almost can't see her denim shorts. She doesn't give a shit what you think. Silence, save the humming of the train. A weird bulge hidden underneath her loose sleeveless top, it can't be her tummy, it can't be the way she's sitting - I'm perplexed, until she gets out a wad of five-dollar notes from her pocket. Ah. A fanny pack. Of course. She counts them with one hand and then puts them back. Silence. Her feet slide outwards and then in again, a little slipper-stomp, restless, as the train hums on. Watching her makes me feel restless, too - I've been on the train for half an hour without a book; my phone is dead; I'm half-considering getting out three stops early to walk home just so I don't need to be sitting still for another five minutes.

The train comes to a sleepy halt at Clementi, pauses, takes off again as it announces its next stop. She gets up abruptly, plastic bags and paper cone. Gets to the train doors on my left in three large climbing strides, as if she's tackling a mountain. Her legs actually look like they could belong to a high school netballer. They're slim and toned, even more tanned than the rest of her, not a golden glow but a somewhat dull dark tint, sun-charred. Her feet, though, are scarred with an undefined number of little discoloured irregular spots, bearing testament to hard things dropped or hot liquid accidentally spilt through the years. Metallic silver polish on neatly cut toenails. Suddenly she turns and hastes towards the train door on my right instead. The train zooms into Jurong East then slows, slows, comes to a complete stop; half the people in my carriage get out of their seats and wait at the doors. As soon as they open the crowd runs in hurried streams to the train on the opposite platform - it's probably the last one for the night. I still catch sight of that stark white cone. It floats past the barrier and the woman finds a seat right at the centre of my line of vision, her back facing me, her cone still being held upright like the torch of Lady Liberty.