THE BUS RIDE

A very odd bus ride with some very odd passengers

The bus lurched along the virtually unmade road that should have led from Thistledown Creek to Bumleigh Downs and been nice and smooth, and the passenger on the third seat back directly behind the driver jostled and jiggled like a sack of potatoes about to topple over, but she never did.

Her hat was a broad-brimmed affair, enhanced by an almost threadbare feather that would have looked better on the Bird of Paradise that had spawned it. The coat that had been pulled tightly about her was drab with age, soiled where her fingers had groped for her pocket almost daily over a period of many years.

A boy, maybe ten years old, spectacled, tousle-headed, pointed at the third seat behind the driver..

“Look, mum, she's asleep!” he giggled. “Fancy being able to sleep on an old jalopy like this”

His mother frowned, wishing he could learn to whisper when he was saying something personal about someone else, but she had to concede he was right. Falling to sleep during this kind of journey was the one thing she would have thought an impossibility.

“Not so loud!” she hissed.

“But he's right!” chortled a fat man on the seat behind. “I'd not have thought any road could be quite as rough as this one, all pot-holes and rubble and stuff!”

“I've been this way before and it was never this bad,” put in another passenger, from somewhere near the back of the bus. “Last time I came it was quite smooth. I remarked on it, didn't I Patience?” he asked the woman sitting next to him.

“That you did, Digory,” mumbled his companion in a rich contralto-flavoured voice, nodding.

The old woman with the soiled coat and the feathered hat slid to one side and slowly, as if propelled by a kind of slow-motion machine, started slithering off her seat and towards the floor of the bus.

“Look at her!” hissed the boy, loudly. “She'll wake up soon, sure as sure!”

“It's odd,” muttered the fat man. “You'd have thought she'd have stirred by now! I reckon �" I don't like to say it, not with a little 'un here and all, but I reckon she's dead!”

“Don't say!” moaned Digory from the back of the bus, and he made to tickle Patience. “Give us a kiss!” he teased.

“You just mind your p's and q's,” hissed the mother to her son, irrelevantly, as he turned to see what was going on.

The bus slowed down at that. The passengers looked out of the window but there wasn't much to be seen. It was a grey kind of day, the sort that might wet a person through if he spent much time in it. But they could see there wasn't a bus stop anywhere near. No row of potential passengers with their hands out to stop the bus. Just a greyness, unremitting, monochrome.

The driver climbed out of his seat and pointed to the feathered woman, now draped untidily on the floor.

“You,” he hissed, more sibilant than a snake.”Get off my bus! How dared you behave in such an unseemly way, draping yourself on the floor as if you were a corpse ready for the next world?”

“I think she's dead...” sniggered the bespectacled boy. “She looks dead. Ain't it fun?”

“Just you be quiet or I'll smack your legs!” slashed his mother as quietly as she could whilst remaining dangerous and threatening.

“Who? Me?” groaned the feather-hatted woman. “Me, dead? Not yet, deary, not yet at all!”

“I said get off my bus this instant!” hissed the driver. “Get off now!” The door slid silently open, inviting the old woman to climb off.

“Okay, okay,” grumbled the old woman. She cast her eyes back over her fellow passengers. “They've a cheek, sayin' as I was dead! Just you look at 'em!”

The driver pushed his nose right up to the old woman's and winked.

“It's all been a mistake,” he said. “You get off this bus right now and you'll be okay. This bus ain't for you. No madame, no, you bet it isn't! This bus is for the dead!”

The boy was about to protest that the stupid driver had got it all wrong when his eyes fell out. His mother, rather than chastise him yet again, splintered into dust. Digory and Patience were about to exchange a little kiss, but his face melted into hers. The driver shook his head sadly as the fat man dissolved

“That's what happens,” he said to the old woman as she wearily climbed off the bus, “that's what happens when you stop unexpectedly on the road to hell!”

© Peter Rogerson 09.08.10

Reviews

[roarke]

heh, twisty little piece. I enjoyed all the bus riders chiming in to the conversation. I knew something was up by the bus drivers shouting behavior. This story has all the right stuff for the journey, no matter which way the reader is headed.

[Peter Rogerson]

This is the kind of story I most like writing, when I'm not quite sure where it's going myself - until it gets there, of course.