The Bus Ride
Darla hoisted her damp school bag on a nail screwed hastily onto the upper ledge of a fat paned, curtainless window whose peeling purple lamination looked like a scar. This window was the first in its aisle following fifteen others, belonging to a fat yellow bus with luggage tied to its roof like a mini caravan.
Its seats were topsy-turvy yet firm, except when the bumps hit. Then the caramel-colored bus was wimpy compared to scooters, and Toyota corollas on secondhand repair. Though flustered, it got out of road trouble like a jiggly bit of custard. Like when it leaned it’s rear too close to the door handles of every passing vehicle or mounted the road that lay ahead of a speed bump in a lurching, gaseous pant, which meant lifting its right tires almost into the crosswalk, like a dog lifting its hind legs. Then there were it’s tickets with their smearable ink and printing that could never get its eights, sixes and zeroes right.
But neither did its passengers bat an eye, not those close to Darla, one of them being the labradoodle on its haunches, with a red sour patch tongue licking and nuzzling its seat cover, and the throat clearing man, whose phlegm looked like reheated chicken soup, as it made a small yellow puddle in the cup of his wrinkly cold palms. Aside from its little nasally squeaks, the labradoodle whined and shoved its curly black perm into Darla’s bowl cut, making her profusely scratch her head with a pencil she’d borrowed from her homeroom teacher.
The teenager just ahead sprayed deodorant through her shirt, which blanketed like some dawn time fog around Darla, who found it rather reminiscent of her teacher’s perfumed fingers and manicured pink nails, adorned by the clinking set of bangles welded tight to her fat wrists, rubbing away at a ruled page in a diagonal sweep across the page before handing Darla a sharpened pencil from her pencil stand.
The old lady sitting next to her with the silver and blonde hair extensions who was now munching on a Tupperware of brownies while hissing at the poodle, gave Darla a revelation. She’d always wondered what her teacher’s pencil stand tasted like, since hers at home mostly resembled that of cardboard and glue. Now, she knew that the brown pencil stands on the marble desk which was pushed to the corner of the workbook closet would taste like chocolate, since it was made of bark.
Bark reminded her of the bottles of champagne she’d always seen in movies, ejecting corks and foaming at their green glass mouths. She had decided bark and cork were one and the same, in the sense that they were “chocolate flavored” and since champagne and pencils in pencil stands always had cork or were either made of bark. She exclaimed, as she now “understood,” the reason why adults didn’t let children ever have a sip of champagne. It was because it was as indulgent as the Willy Wonka chocolate forest reserves. That had to be it!
“Stop rocking your feet, little girl, or that doodle there will tear them apart, like his chew toy”, the old lady said, tucking her Tupperware into a woolly purse.
The trembling lady then tied only her blonde extensions into braids before crossing her arms to tuck her bag into her armpit and in minutes let out snot laden snores.
Darla, now cross-legged and with socks rubbing contently against the acupunctural blue cushion embroidered with a withering yellow sunflower, slowed down her breath. The hair extensions and the strands of silver that glittered in the sunlight, the poodle who tried shoving his sausage shaped snout in between the seats, alerted Darla to the skin tags and tattoos that floated like crocodiles around the copper rings on each of this ‘too-old-to-be-a-gypsy’ of a lady’s fingers. This made Darla and the poodle get on their haunches and gaze closer at the skinny gypsy lady’s face.
Her warts were like stairs leading down to her mouth, which was glued open by a trickle of drool that turned the bus engine’s urine like pungency into rotten milk. This made Darla gasp, as often she and the street dogs or that black poodle sitting behind her would’ve been the probable ones to be reprimanded on hygiene. Because adults were always molded and refined silicon dolls.
Right across from the doodle, a pregnant woman huffed and puffed gracefully through bouts of nausea, fanning herself before slipping right into a nap. So, Darla found it rational to assume the very back of the seats would’ve been filled with more passengers fermenting in sleep and didn’t bother turning behind, cause the entire bus asleep except her felt like an inside joke she wasn’t made a part of, and it now made her nauseated and cranky.
The engine growled, the sides of the bus jiggled, and they were tossed across each side of their aisles as if they were in a sieve. They were now sloshing their way into a rusty forsaken town with trees whose fruits were either rotten, infected or as yellow and sour as a ripening tomato.
Darla’s bag which was still obstinately damp, dropped down with a plop onto her thighs and although it was a dull thud, it shook the lady beside her awake, made the Pomeranian yelp, and a formed a large damp stain on the very middle of Darla’s skirt, which made the grunting, yawning lady raise her eyebrows and shrug her way back into a disgruntled and lethargic nap.
A soggy, bitten into jelly sandwich, that looked like a broken shard of furniture wood; a dusty grey pebble which was a green jellybean during Math class, until it rolled out of her pocket and underneath the workbook closet; and a slice of cheddar cheese, that was now garnished with playground sand like a spice rub on a cherished brisket. Those were Darla’s current snack options. Once the old lady had stomped down the bus, not without a reprimand and snatching Darla’s bag away to stuff it underneath her seat. Now, a black doodle’s squeaks and a lady munching a frozen pizza out of a spiderman lunchbox while tickling her pregnant belly, was all that loomed over a sudden gripping urge, that was almost as willful and fleshy as a hand, pressing down on Darla’s stomach.
She wanted to sip at the plastic bendy straw attached to her depleting bottle of water, adding exaggerated and loud sips, as if it was cherry cola out of Styrofoam. But instead, she grew sicker at each swallow from her pink bottle tainted with a faded print of a princess that looked more decapitated and in tatters than adorned in a frothy pink gown, and the water was foamy, with a hint of detergent and marinara.
Her mother had once again forgotten to rinse out the soap that morning.
The jelly sandwich was sweet to the point her gums and her teeth felt like they were sinking in its greasy strawberry lather. So, she’d settled with the cheese and crunched on the bits of rubble with the corners of her teeth like gum, to add more cleavage and beauty to the absurdity of her petty and otherwise insolent boredom, that came with staring into a grassy road or sniffing the rancidity of the sleeping strangers.
Soon, the hand that used to press down her stomach, now gripped it’s flesh like it was preparing to skin her gut. Her throat remained clogged with water, till a spray of foamy bubbles sprang out from a hole in the bottom she’d never realized existed and spewed with such an intensity onto her lap.
As she tried to rub the puddle into the navy of her skirt, like she’d done multiple times throughout the day whenever she’d spilled water on herself, her throat opened up like the springy opening of a cork from a bottle, and the puddle formed on her cotton navy skirt turned into a running fountain.
The pregnant lady from row three who’d just finished her third slice, exclaimed at the bus driver. He’d driven three blocks ahead, which meant she’d have to waddle in nausea and swollen feet with five bags of accessory shopping over to the bank that was shrewd in terms of maternity leave. Eventually though, the jiggly bit of metal jerked to a shrill steaming halt. With her shopping bags swinging over each seat and almost into the doodle’s drooling snout, she let out a breathless scream at the now gasping and red eyed Darla.
“Sweetie, where are your parents? Do you have their number on you? How far away are you? Bus driver, there’s a sick little girl emptying her guts out, we need assistance!”
As Darla’s head swung back from the fatigue, she’d taken a glance at the peppy pink flowered shrubs they were parked near now, and imagined they’d smelt like the mosquito bite ointment her mother used to rub into her skin, that was a soapy pink liquid. Darla had called it, melted lotion, cause the chemical name was too long of a word and she’d been ridiculed every time she’d gotten it wrong, despite being taught to “break down the word.”
The tears paused at the corners of her eyes, swaying like a slowed down swing until she took a deep breath, and they ran down her cheek in such a rush, that they could’ve been likened to bees flying out of a bustling hive. She then stared into the lady’s shopping bags and parked her gaze at a white and brown spotted scarf that looked very much like the curling silhouette of the cat that roamed the city. It was from a library book she’d borrowed at school, after they’d made it mandatory that every little child had to know how to read a five plus and above book.
She’d been reading it on the school bus, which was just a couple blocks and a restaurant away from home. It started by admiring the warmth of the caricature and then extended to a page and then two, for she had to (at least while she was in the bus) dispose from her memory the workbook page that had been met with the slash of a red pen across her persistent and strenuous alphabets, along with a “do better,” remark and a signature that Darla been deciphering to be an “F.”
Until of course, her mother pulled it out of her bag and made her sit for a two-hour long study, when all she wanted to do was see and finally talk to the kitty that roamed the city. This “insolence,” “disinterest,” “laziness,” and “misbehavior,” led Darla to being locked out of her door with her school bag in hand. Banging her little fists against the ethnic design of the yellowish wood in fits of screams and sobs did nothing except make a street dog howl and the wind blow slower than it did earlier. She wasn’t sure if she was rousing up a “tantrum,” for the book that remained inside or in repentance for her mother who’d she’d tormented and terrified.
But all she knew, as she stared out the now plastic and transparent rattling window, that was facing a suburban porch just like home’s, was the bus’s first inquisitive honk that came out of its metal snout, when she’d sat hunched over her porch stairs scratching at a reddening mosquito bite and shooing the street dog. That this yellow jiggling monstrosity had somehow promised a warmth, for her to curl into one of its seats like the cat in the book and ride along, till maybe someone opened the book again, right after finishing it, like she did and soon she’d too be right at her mother’s doorstep again and just about to step into the bus.
An anomaly of such a kind, as thrilling as the redundant circular adventure of a giant teacups ride, could also mean maybe she’d next emerge out of a chicken meatball house with an onion soup smelling chimney and watch a cloud made of spaghetti on a garlic porch swarmed with oregano flies, petting dogs made of bread and then bounce on a mozzarella trampoline emerging from a strawberry marshmallow growing backyard.
NOTE: This is a larger short story I’d started about eight months ago, until I decided to give it it’s due conclusion about a day ago. Possibly inspired by that eerie, chlorine reeking, absurdity of a tear-jerker small town Christmas-time story that Donna Tartt had worked on. I’m quite passionate about writing stories like those myself and since this is quite a venture away from my usual ramblings that tend to veer from the coherent streetlights of sentence structure, aka my poetry, do let me know if this really does end up clicking.
