Sometimes life gets overwhelming and a change of scenery is needed. Write a three sentence story about getting on a bus and getting off on a stop you wouldn’t expect.
Break From Reality. Daily.
Sometimes life gets overwhelming and a change of scenery is needed. Write a three sentence story about getting on a bus and getting off on a stop you wouldn’t expect.
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The bus ground to a halt and the doors opened with a whoosh, arriving in an area completely foreign to me and, as was evident from his current grimace, the Bus Driver. All the other passengers had disappeared, leaving only us 2 to stare out the windows at the sun-soaked, palm tree laden beach paradise that we had driven into. The Driver suggested that he may have made a wrong turn at the last roundabout, and I was quite inclined to agree with him, but right now all I could think was, ‘I do hope the Margaritas here are cheap.’
Something was odd about that trip, Frank thought, as he stepped off the bus and was greeted by the funny little man with the mustache, the one who didn’t look quite human. “You are the bus,” the man said. “Huh?” Frank said as a door appeared where his navel was, and a tiny version of himself stepped out of it.
Her breath was heaving as she ran and leapt onto the bus, the last one tonight, and paid her fare. After a twenty-hour shift in accident and emergency she was bone tired and within minutes she was snoring gently slumped into corner of the back seat. When she woke it was deathly silent, there was total darkness outside and inside, and the bus was unmanned – with the doors locked shut.
Benny was flustered to see such an attractive woman driver on the empty last bus to Bracknell. “Do you go all the way?” he asked, realising immediately how the question might be misconstrued, but at the same time musing on the exciting possibilities of any such misconstruction. In fact the driver construed the question exactly in line with his imagination, making a long, unscheduled stop well before they reached Bracknell.
The bus doors shut behind as I made my way to the back. After a brief nap, I wake to see the bus empty of all its passengers, except for myself, and at a stand still against the pitch-black darkness of the outside. A knock came at my window provoking me to stare through the glass only to see the fire pits in the distance consuming the other passengers as their flesh melted and dispersed into the same gaseous emissions that seemed to fuel the fires.
Bus 20 ran the same route everyday. Then the rains came and trees fell. The maze I took home on the bus that day let me off in front of my grandmother’s old house, and the memories were bittersweet.
OTHER BUSES, OTHER STREETS
My boyfriend and I are both volatile by nature and share a habit of starting fights on buses we ride together so we agreed to break off our relationship before we either killed each other or were thrown off one more bus.
Now it’s a few weeks later and I climb on my homeward-bound bus, exhausted from my dull job and my duller life, and there he is rushing towards me from the back of the bus for a repeat of the same old story – small pinches, larger smacks, then the free for all until the sudden bus stop, ending with us both on the pavement.
“I’ve missed you,” he whispers sweetly as he lovingly picks me up and walks me home.
His feet are planted firmly on the threshold of the bus, letting out a faint breath he is taking it all in the smell of rain invading his nostrils.
He is off the bus now his feet on the muddy path, and his backpack like much burden he is trying to leave behind is settled on his back.
He kisses her picture and smiles.
“I’m here to enlist.” he says with a tight grip on the picture and another on the strap of his bag.