The Purse.

Max was a good person. That’s what he kept repeating in his head as he followed the purse, slowly and from a certain distance, on it’s way to the intersection. “You can make it Max, you can make it. Think of MAX POWER. Come on! Come on! You have the POWER to do it!!” The purse dangled and swung; the purse’s carrier was in a hurry. The pendulous movement kept him mesmerized and perfectly focused on his objective: the purse. As he walked ten feet behind, measuring his pace against the velocity of the swing, he kept mumbling, “come on Max, you can do it, think of MAX POWER!” All of a sudden his attention skewed from his purpose and he thought about that journalist who had said The Simpsons was a show for stoned slackers. He loved The Simpsons and he definitely fit that stoned-slacker profile, as most of his friends did, but still, that seemed to him a poor judgement; unfair to The Simpsons authors.
“Come on man, keep concentrated…you can do it!”

Max had followed the purse for a while now, he could not figure out the right moment to strike. It was the first time he did something like this and he was not even sure why he wanted to. All he knew was that he had decided to go for it and he would not bolt; he was no chicken.
The intersection seemed like the right place, at least symbolically. For the last time he skimmed in his head the list of actions he should have undertaken. Speed up; approach; engage; pull; run fast in the direction of the pull, namely, back where he was coming from; disappear. It seemed fast, easy.
He started speeding up, the purse still swung at the same tempo. In a few seconds he was already two feet away; it was now or never. He rushed the last two steps, grabbed the shoulder strap and pulled back violently.

That exact same moment Max saw a white wall of metal race fast from the right to the left corner of his visual field, no more than 10 inches away from the purse carrier’s nose. It was a quick, bright flash, accompanied by a squeaking sound and immediately followed by the smell of burned rubber. He looked to his right and saw the big town-bus, not in motion, but still bouncing on the springs because of the abrupt braking.
It had stopped 20 feet away from them. Max’s hand still clamped hard on the shoulder strap. That flash was to him as the finger-snap of the hypnotist at the end of a session.
He looked around.
He and the young lady whom he was holding by the purse were in the middle of the intersection. She had missed the DON’T WALK light and was heading directly to her own rendezvous with 2 tons of steel.

She turned toward him, still in shock, and he saw her for the first time as a person. A beautiful young lady in her early twenties with two wonderful, wide, blue eyes, made even wider by the near-death experience. She looked at him, already in love, and whispered, “Thank you.”