Chapter 1: The Bus That Never Arrives
The bench was cold. It always was, even in the vague suggestion of afternoon sun that strained through the clouds. The metal was a sculpture of decay, a rusted question mark that dug into my thigh.I shifted. The body today was older, aches in the knees, a weariness in the shoulders that spoke of years I wasn't sure I’d actually lived. A man’s hands, broad and callused, rested on the faded corduroy of his thighs.I watched a drop of water gather at the awning’s edge. It hung, fat and optical, reflecting a distorted world upside down, before falling with a soft plink onto a patch of moss in the cracked concrete.Another judgment passed.
The scent hit me then. First, the thick, almost edible smell of caramelizing sugar from the factory off the highway—a smell that felt like childhood, though I couldn’t pin down which one. Then, cutting through it, the ghost of a woman’s perfume. Gardenia and something sharper, like cracked peppercorn.It was unmistakable and completely gone by the time I took a second breath.
“It never sticks around,” a voice said beside me.“The good smells, I mean. Just the wet dog and the bus exhaust.”
I hadn’t heard her sit down. She was maybe sixty, maybe ageless, holding a folded newspaper in the shape of an umbrella. Her dress was the color of a storm cloud.“I’m waiting for the 14,” I said. My voice was a baritone today, rough with disuse.
“The 14,” she repeated, as if tasting the number.“Last seen 1973. You’ve got a long wait.”
The schedule posted on the leaning pole was bleached blank.I knew this. I also knew the bus would come.The knowing had no reason behind it, just a hollow certainty in my gut.
“It’ll come,” I said.“Oh, absolutely,” she agreed, cheerful. She began to unfold her newspaper umbrella. The pages were today’s—headlines about a treaty signed on a moon I’d never heard of. She opened it with a crisp snap, holding it aloft though the drizzle had stopped.Under its canopy, she produced a small white box from her bag. “Cake?”
Inside, on a doily, was a slice of something golden. It shimmered. Not a trick of the light—it actually flickered, like a guttering flame or a memory fighting to stay alight. The scent was overwhelming: brown butter, vanilla pod, a hint of salt.It was the smell of a kitchen I’d never stood in.
I didn’t take it. “What kind of cake is it?”
“The kind you remember after you eat it.” She smiled.Her eyes were the same color as the puddle at our feet. “Go on.It’s polite to share with fellow travelers.”
The word ‘travelers’ echoed. I took the plate.The cake was warm.I took a bite.It was not a taste. It was a collapse.For a fraction of a second, I was not on the bench. I was small, my hands sticky, watching a woman with my face—but younger, softer—pull a pan from an oven, laughing at something I’d just said. The sunlight through a different window was butter-yellow.Then it was gone. The taste left my mouth entirely, leaving behind only the ghost of its own disappearance and a profound, aching sweetness on the roof of my mouth.
I was back on the bench.My hands were a man’s hands again, steadying the plate. A tremor ran through them.“See?” the woman said, reclaiming the plate. The cake was whole again, untouched. “Sometimes you have to taste where you’ve been to know where you’re standing.”
I stared at the puddle.My reflection was wrong. For a flicker, it showed the face of the child from the memory—a girl with flour on her nose. I blinked.It was just the man’s tired face again.“Who are you?”
“Today? Today I’m the woman with the newspaper umbrella.” She folded the paper again, the headlines vanishing into the creases.“You?”
The question was a trap. I’d fallen into it before. Giving a name was like nailing a butterfly to a board—it stopped the flight, corrupted the thing itself.“Leo,” I said, pulling the first name that felt loose enough. It felt as true as any other.
“Leo,” she nodded, as if filing it away in a cabinet she’d never open.“Leo, the bus will arrive just after you stop expecting it. The trick is to want it, but not to wait for it. There’s a difference.”
A truck rumbled past, shaking the ground. For a second, the world dissolved into noise and vibration.When it cleared, the woman was studying me, her head tilted.
“You’re all loose ends,” she murmured, not unkindly.“Unfinished sentences. It must be exhausting.”
It was.The exhaustion was a bone-deep chill no sun could touch. To constantly be assembling a self from whatever fragments were at hand—the ache in this knee, the memory of that cake, the baritone of this voice. I was a continuous act of creation, and most days I was a bad artist.
“What’s at the end of the 14 line?” I asked, to drown out my own thoughts.“What’s at the beginning of any line?” she countered. “A point.A decision.A mistake. The bus doesn’t care.” She stood up suddenly, smoothing her grey dress.“My stop is here.”
“This is a bus stop. No bus has come.”
“Precisely.” She shouldered her bag, the empty cake box now inside. “You’ll know it when you see it, Leo-who-isn’t-Leo. Look for the door.”
And she walked away, not down the sidewalk, but directly into the stained brick wall of the pharmacy behind our bench.She didn’t vanish. She simply ceased being part of this particular arrangement of light and shadow.I was alone.The sugar scent was gone. Only the damp and the distant growl of city remained. I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.The certainty about the bus was gone, evaporated with her. All that was left was the cold bench, the rust, the endless, ticking drip from the awning.I gave up.Not on the bus, but on the expecting. The wanting remained—a sharp, desperate knot in my chest—but the tense, wired anticipation drained from my muscles. I slouched on the question mark of metal, letting the grey sky fill my vision. I thought about the cake that was a memory.I thought about the perfume that wasn’t there. I became, for a moment, just a thing sitting on a bench, as inert as the concrete beneath me.That’s when I heard it. Not the rumble of a diesel engine, but a softer, older sound—the squeal of pneumatics, the hiss of an opening door. It didn’t come from the street.It came from the wall.
A rectangle of light appeared in the brickwork where the woman had left. Not a blinding light, but the warm, yellowish glow of incandescent bulbs. And within that frame, I saw the first step of a bus, the worn rubber tread, the silver handrail.A scent drifted out to me.Not sugar. Not gardenia.It was ozone, hot metal, and something green, like a forest after lightning.
The bus, it seemed, didn’t require a road.The door hung open, an invitation. The interior was dark, shadowy.I stood up, my knees popping. The body I inhabited felt suddenly less fixed, more like a suit of clothes I could step out of. I took a step toward the light in the wall.The wanting flared, bright and clear.
I stopped expecting a bus on the street. Now, I had to decide if I was getting on this one.
Now, I had to decide if I was getting on this one.The door didn’t waver. The light from inside didn’t flicker.It was the most solid impossible thing I’d ever seen. I took a step closer, the gravel crunching under my shoes—shoes I hadn’t chosen, but that were part of today’s ensemble.The smell of ozone grew stronger, a clean, violent smell. It promised motion.I heard a cough from inside.Not a threatening sound. Just a dry, human hack.It was somehow more grounding than the magic wall.Someone was in there, waiting.
“You boarding or not?” a voice called out. It was weary, textured with decades of cigarette smoke and asking that same question. “Schedule’s a suggestion, not an invitation.”
That did it.The mundane impatience of it.I walked toward the light in the wall. The transition wasn’t a dissolving; it was a step up. My foot landed on the grooved rubber step, my hand closed around the cool metal pole, and I pulled myself into the bus.
It wasn’t a mystical chariot.It was a bus. Faded blue upholstery patched with duct tape, a linoleule floor sticky in places, that universal smell of old brakes and industrial cleaner. The windows showed not the brick wall or the street, but a rushing blur of color and shadow, like oil on water.The driver watched me in the large rearview mirror. He had a face that seemed assembled from spare parts—one pale blue eye, one brown, a jaw shadowed with stubble that was more salt than pepper.A cap was pulled low.
“Fare?” he asked.I patted my corduroy pockets.Empty. “I don’t think I have anything.”
“Most don’t,” he grunted.“Sit down. You’re blocking the aisle.”
I moved down the center.The bus was maybe half full. A teenager with headphones, nodding to a beat I couldn’t hear. An older woman knitting with yarn that seemed to bleed color into her lap. A man in a perfectly tailored suit, staring out at the blur as if reading stock quotes.They all felt real, solid, wrapped in their own worlds.
I slid into a seat near the back.The vinyl sighed under my weight. I watched the non-landscape streak by, feeling the low hum of the engine in my teeth. The initial shock faded, replaced by a simple, profound curiosity.Where did this go?Who drove it?Why me?
The bus hit a bump, a jolt that travelled up my spine. The knitting woman’s ball of yarn tumbled from her lap and rolled down the slanted floor, coming to rest against my foot. I bent, picked it up.It was warm.
“Thank you, dear,” she said as I handed it back.Her eyes were magnified behind thick lenses. “It’s easy to lose your thread.”
“I bet.”
“Oh, it’s not a bet,” she said, her needles clicking again.“It’s a fact.You hold on too tight, it snaps. You hold too loose, it unravels. The tension is everything.” She looked at me, not through me.“You’re all tension today, aren’t you? Trying to decide which strand is yours.”
The driver announced a stop, his voice garbled.The doors hissed open. Outside was a desert, vast and silent under a purple twilight.No one moved to get off. No one was waiting.After a moment, the doors sighed shut and the blur began again.
I leaned my head against the cool glass.The woman was right.I was a fist clenched around nothing. Leo, not-Leo, man, girl, child—they were just costumes. Underneath was just the wanting, the waiting, the watching for the next sign.It was exhausting. Maybe the bus wasn’t taking me somewhere.Maybe it was the somewhere.A space between the notes.
The suit man got off at a stop that was a forest, dripping and green. The teenager left in a city square I almost recognized. The knitter gathered her things at a crossroads under a bruised-yellow sky.Soon, it was just me and the driver, reflected in his mirror.
“Last stop’s coming up,” he said, his eyes finding mine in the glass.
“What’s there?”
“How should I know?I just drive the route. I don’t get off.” He turned the wheel, and the blur outside slowed, resolving into shapes. “You gotta exit the vehicle.Policy.”
The bus glided to a halt.The doors opened.
No dramatic vista greeted me.It was a room. A small, plain room with beige walls and a single wooden chair sitting under a hanging, unadorned light bulb.It was aggressively ordinary. The utter end of the line.I stood up.My legs felt like mine again, whatever that meant. I walked down the aisle, my footsteps loud in the quiet. I paused at the top of the steps, my hand on the pole.The driver didn’t look back.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.“Don’t thank me,” he muttered. “You paid your fare by getting on.”
I stepped off the bus and into the room.The doors hissed shut behind me. I heard the pneumatic release, the growl of the engine, and then silence. When I turned, the wall was blank.Just me.And the chair.And the light.I sat. The wood was hard, unforgiving. I waited for a door to appear, for a voice, for a sign.Nothing happened.The air was still and slightly dusty.This was it. The place after the waiting.The destination.And it was empty.
A slow, stupid laugh bubbled up in my throat and escaped.It echoed flatly in the sterile space.All that. The bench, the rust, the dripping, the woman, the cake, the impossible bus. All of it, to arrive here.In a blank room.
But the laugh died as a second feeling arose, hot on its heels.It wasn’t disappointment.It was anger.A clean, sharp fury.This? This was the punchline?To be deposited in a fucking waiting room at the end of creation?
“No,” I said to the empty air.My voice didn’t sound like Leo’s.