Panic! At the bus stop

A breeze washed over me, the Autumn wind caressing my skin with the welcoming air of a new school year. Leaves once perched upon their branches spun from their home, twinkling down with fiery hues until inevitably cluttering the streets below. The concrete was busied with the clamor of children running around with excited shouts while the steadfast congestion of traffic honked along its usual itinerary.

I kicked at a pebble aimlessly, standing in wait next to a sign that read: “67, Route de Nord (North route).” I had started my last year at a new high school for almost a month now, and I was still unable to follow my daily schedule. I had already been late four times over the past week, and today would be the fifth if the bus kept taking its sweet time.

I gazed at the other individuals waiting in line beside me. There was a small boy, maybe seven or eight, who had on a bright yellow turtleneck shirt cutting around his throat complete with a pair of adorable blue overalls curling over his shoulders. His messy blonde hair bounced happily as he seemed to be playing imaginary battles in his mind. He jabbed at the air in an attempt to scathe his invisible foe. I didn’t see any presence of a guardian, which I’m sure was the cause of his excitement.

The sound of metal clinked together next to the child, the source being a crate of beer bottles held by the hand of a crusty-looking fellow. He was a young man, barely reaching his twenties, and his risky demeanor reflected this. He juggled a beer bottle in his left hand while cradling the bud of a cigarette between his lips. The slosh of alcohol and the crackle of smoke fused together in an unhealthy synergy.

In the corner sat an old lady, her wispy hair turned grey from all the years it grew. A long, white dress tickled the ground around her feet and the flowers embroidered upon the cloth seemed to wink along with her face. Despite her whimsical appearance, an odd feeling struck me. As I continued to stare at her, I realized with a start that she was doing the same. Her aged pupils followed mine, gazing at me with perfect accuracy. It was as though I was a target she was aiming to strike.

I looked away, unease creeping up my skin.

“Those things will burn a hole through your throat, you know.” The old lady was gesturing to the young man’s cigarette poised between his index and middle finger.

The junkie stared at her for a moment, before taking a long drag on his fume and spitting a puff of smoke into the woman’s face.

I was shocked, expecting the old woman to be rightfully outraged, but when I searched her face I found her eyes pointed at mine once again. Her stare held me in place like a giant fist clutching at my sides and rooting me in place. This time, though, I found myself puzzled, for her expression no longer wore the look of a predator. Her eyes were fearful.

I found myself bringing my hands to my face like swabs, hurriedly patting my skin. Was there something on my face? Or maybe my sweater? God, I knew this colour didn’t look good on me!

The sudden burn of déjà vu seared my brain like a clothing iron, flattening my mind as a memory roared in the back of my head. Dancing in its flames was my sister and I, her giggling filling my mind with painful echoes of the past. She and I had gone to this very bus stop dozens of times, and I remembered her remarks on the colour of my sweater.

“You look like an orange!" she’d said snidely. I’d retorted by smacking her over the head playfully, leading into an aggressive fighting match. We’d done everything together, our heads on different sides of the same coin. Although I wouldn’t admit it, her charismatic yet annoying presence was comforting, and now I felt dissonant without her by my side. I’d been listening to her all my life, but now it was as if someone had plugged my ears.

I heard a crash, and I nearly jumped out of my skin until the commotion unveiled itself as a small, black, furry figure thrifting through mounds of garbage in the nearby alley way. It was just a cat.

Just as that last thought floated through my mind, I felt the air turn cold as wind nipped and bit at my unshielded skin, howling at me in a gusted warning. In response, there was a scream behind me that ripped me from my shrouded mind, taking the wool from over my eyes and bringing me to my senses.

I turned in time to see a flash of movement, and suddenly the old woman was lying on her side, curled like one of the many leaves bristling through the sidewalk. The leaves crunched like sizzled meat beneath the steps of the small boy as he backed away from the old lady’s body, his face a sheet of whitened horror. When I moved my gaze, I could see the junkie sprinting down the sidewalk, fear seizing his frame and pushing him as far away from this bus stop as possible, his crate of bottles clinking in suit.

Although my better judgement advised otherwise, I shakily walked around the bus stop sign that protruded from the ground and stepped towards the woman’s figure. The air was suddenly still now, unblinking as it watched my movement, a halted heartbeat as quiet as the old lady.

I finally closed the distance between us. “Wha—?” my sentence was cut short by the gag welling in my throat. The woman’s face was enriched by the beating sunlight, causing the blood that dripped down her cheeks to sparkle like a thousand twinkling diamonds. The blood ran a path up her jaw and around her nose, pooling at the ridge of her eyelids, where two empty sockets gazed blankly up at me. It was as if someone had carved her eyes straight out of her skull, leaving two vacant holes where life used to reside.

That was the last image burned into my retinas as a distant thumping noise filled my mind like the ticking of a grand clock. It hovered in the air, falling back and forth, as my vision shimmered and the elderly woman’s desecrated face faded into the background.

The ticking disappeared, and I found myself poised at my original position. I blinked feverishly, swivelling my head around to my surroundings. The bus stop stood the same as before, laying residence to the same people in line. The child was back again, swinging his fists in imaginary combat, while the young man sat with his pack of alcohol, flicking a lighter to his cigarette, while the lady… Where was she?

The longer my eyes frolicked over the bumpy road and stretched trees reaching over the bus stop, the longer the old woman’s presence evaded my gaze. It was as if she had vanished, snatched away by the shadows' hidden lull.

My breath came in short bursts in front of me, trying to follow the shaking path of my rickety thoughts. Had I imagined it? What else could explain the unchanged behaviour of the other people waiting in line beside me? I could still hear the scream that had set the chain of events to start its way around its unfortunate track. The thump of the old woman’s body crunching against the concrete, the red liquor of her waning life pooling around her head like the depths of some twisted island, and the sculpted thievery of her two eyes flashed through my mind.

Now, the leaves continued to flutter down from their trees like the wings of butterflies, while engines roared along the highway as usual. Everything seemed to be smiling down at me, yet I felt as though I was on the outside of the joke.

I credited this to paranoia. I doubted my thoughts’ terrain to be stable, after all. I wasn’t being myself… The painful memories of my sister had seeped through the floorboards of my mind and molded my brain into a drowning vessel, my logic sinking under the wreckage. I wouldn’t be surprised if the erraticity had started to drip into my vision.

A clicking noise followed by the repelling odor of cancerous smoke wafted through the air, and I curled my nose in disgust. I eyed the junkie, who contentedly sucked on his dart of poison a few meters away from me. I wished I had the courage to tell him off like the old woman had, otherwise we wouldn’t be standing in the middle of a fire, what with the amount of smoke that flitted through the air.

I sighed and moved my attention to the swift stride of a dark feline nabbing at bits of upturned garbage, moving its way gracefully in the dark alleyway and… hadn’t this happened before?

A shout of surprise followed by the smashing of glass pushed my gaze behind me. Streaks of liquor were rolling down the pavement from a broken bottle as the young boy had his hands to his head, his mouth curled open in a horrified scream. He was staring at the twenty year old junkie that staggered around the bus stop in random directions. The man seemed to have dropped his beer bottle, a reaction to the flames that curled around his facial features and engulfed his skull. The white-hot blaze was so thick that I could no longer see his head from behind the wall of flames fiercely licking at his figure. I could swear I saw a flash of movement as a shadow darted away from the burning man.

I shook off my disarray and grabbed the nearest object. Dashing forward, I dumped the remaining contents of the cracked beer bottle over the man’s head, dousing the flames to a sputtering end. The man collapsed to the floor, revealing an image that once again sent a stab of disgust to my stomach. The man’s face was a blackened mess of fried meat as only bits of tissue remained, the likes of which slowly slid down the victim’s charcoaled bone underneath. The smell of burning flesh was suffocating, and I thought I was surely hallucinating as I heard a faint ticking noise scrape the back of my mind, until it soon raised in volume, consuming my thoughts and vision as the horrific scene faded from my mind.

I was standing at the bus stop. Leaves once perched upon their branches spun from their home, twinkling down with fiery hues until inevitably cluttering the streets below. The concrete was busied with the clamor of children running around with excited shouts while the steadfast congestion of traffic honked along its usual itinerary.

This had all happened before. I was sure of it.

Breathlessly, I turned to my right. The bus stop sign stood upright as usual, its frame creaking in the wind, its off-key notes dancing along the gale that cut deep into my bones. Across from me was the young boy, seated alone atop a bench’s wooden frame. We were the only ones at the bus stop.

First the old woman had disappeared, then the junkie. I had a dangerous feeling crawling up my back, a terrifying inkling of what was to come. It was me or the child who were next.

In a beat of tantalizing fear, I made a hurried pace over to the small boy at his bench. He looked up at me with round, almond-coloured eyes, curiosity a sparkling constellation in his pupil’s vast galaxy of inquiry.

“I need you to come with me,” I whispered quickly.

He blinked at me. “Sorry. My mom said I wasn’t s’pose to talk to weird people.”

I groaned. “Okay, I get that, and your mom seems very smart, but I’m not weird, okay? I’m actually… a friend of your mom.”

“No, you’re not.”

God dammit. “Listen, I’m trying to save you before one of us dies!” I grabbed him by the shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” My hand was smacked away as the boy jumped up, brandishing a gleaming rod from his overalls, the metal sharpened to a pointy end. It was a knife, and although small, was still a deadly obstacle in this dangerous game of tag.

“Hey… Let’s calm down, alright?” I raised my hands in surrender.

“You calm down, you here?” The boy waved the blade at my throat skittishly. “You better stay back!”

I smiled, stepping forward. “You’re just a little boy, you’re not going to hurt—” Slash. I jumped back, growling in pain as a thin line of torn skin streaked across my left forearm, spots of red growing fat and dripping from my elbow. My breath caught in my throat as I stared at the knife gripped in the child’s razor-tight fist, my surprise dripping down its metal along with my blood and forming a puddle on the ground. My reflection was a shadow.

It was me or the child who were next. The former thought reverberated in my skull as clarity washed over me in a chilling wave. I was submerging myself in memories as I swam through murky waters, one specific moment clearing its fog to my eyes.

I remembered the junkie’s gruesome death at the bus stop, from the burning start to the fizzled end. Right before he had been victimized to that wretched endeavor, I’d glimpsed the flicker of a shadow surrounding the man, before vanishing from my sight. I’d passed it off as some trick of the light, but now I could see it perfectly in my mind—the shadow’s figure reaching out with arms to the young man before bolting out of sight. This thing had killed the junkie, and quite possibly the old woman, stepping along the outskirts of my vision until now. Now, I could see it clearly turn its head towards me, its features unmasked by my elucidating memory to reveal… me.

“I’ll… I’ll stab you again!” said the boy. My mind simmered and its thoughts came to a resting stop behind my blank eyes. A quiet animosity slithered to a stop along my spine, poised to attack. The sharp tang of metal scraped over my taste buds like the back of a blade.

I rushed forward with striking precision, seizing the knife from the boy’s hand and slamming him to the ground. The sound of hissing emitted from a distance as a black cat scurried away from our commotion.

The boy wheezed as his back rolled over the asphalt painfully, his frame vulnerable and open to any volley of attacks. His eyes widened as he looked up at me, his curious gaze replaced with that of trembling fear. I could sense his worries, his fears and his life all coiled behind his irises in a shining constellation. His annoyance and his security granted from his parents, that one girl named Emily who he thought looked cute but didn’t work up the courage to tell her, his charismatic little sister who was so excited to see him come home every day—

I brought down the blade in simple and precise motions to the side of his neck, slitting open his throat like the yawning pages of a book. His body was still. I could no longer see the constellation in his eyes.

Tick… tock… The familiar vibration enveloped my vision as the pounding noise of my heart synced along with its rhythm, pulling me away from its immoral cockles.

“Everyone aboard!” The screeching halt of wheels grinding against concrete rang out as a large blue bus slid into view. The flashing light of a blinker shone from the bus, its ticking noise travelling through the street. The bus driver, a skinny man in his early thirties, sat at the wheel waiting for our arrival.

Beside me, the clinking of bottles and the putrid aroma of tobacco passed by me as the junkie stepped up the stairs and into the bus. The young boy with his yellow turtleneck and blue overalls bounded through the doorway, the old lady’s flowery dress following in suit behind him. I cleared the thoughts rapping and tapping at my mind and strode within the bus away from the shadows.