i'm so not a fiction-writing person. but i wrote this for my creative writing class. so i thought i'd share. tell me what you think. incidentally, it's based on a dream i had once.
In Which I Dream My Own Death
I’m in an old yellow school bus, bouncing along in the front seat, holding the grubby metal pole. The seat is cracked green vinyl, grayish-white stuffing gobbing out of the cracks like brains. The fly-speckled windows are opened, the bottoms smeared until they’re nearly opaque with god-knows-what.
I’m going—somewhere. The highway stretches out in an endless river of sun-whitened asphalt, the signs coming and going too fast to be legible through the scummy windows. I’m peering anxiously through the spattered windshield, trying to get some sense of where I am, where we’re going. And then I see my exit, disappearing.
“You missed the exit.” I look over at the driver. She’s bouncing in her seat like a kindergartener, singing along soundlessly to whatever the headphones are blaring. Her feet don’t reach the pedals. Her pigtails bounce with her. She’s not even pretending to watch the road. Not looking at me, either.
“You missed the exit!” I’m shouting now, trying to pierce the bubble of sound and indifference that she seems cloaked in. “Please take the next one, I need to get off!” I’m straining my eyes to read the next sign. It’s illegible—the letters keep shifting, so one minute it reads Salisbury, 10 miles and the next minute none of this makes sense, does it. It, too, goes by.
I’m supposed to be getting back to college. We’re on a highway somewhere in Maryland. That doesn’t explain the mountains, or why I don’t have a clue where we are; I’ve driven this a hundred times, back and forth. For that matter, it doesn’t explain why the signs keep changing, or what the hell I’m doing on this filthy school bus, rattling down the road.
“Take the next exit! I have to get back!” I’m screaming now, more frightened than I was before I knew where I was supposed to be going. The bus driver looks over at me and smiles, almost getting us crushed by a semi hauling double trailers. The horns blare. The bus driver, I realize, has my face.
It dawns on me, finally, that I’m trapped on this bus. I’m at the mercy of a crazy bus driver with my face, and we’re bouncing and rattling down this four-lane highway, passing every exit that might take me anywhere. All the screaming and yelling in the world isn’t going to do me any good. So I shut up, and watch the exits blur past the window, fast-moving dots of green flying past. This is my own personal vision of hell. Except I always thought there’d be more people in it.
So I try one more time. “Please, get off the highway!” The bus driver with my face turns and smiles. And steers us off the highway. The bus hits the grassy embankment and picks up speed. We go hurtling down a hill covered in long burnt grass like some huge shaggy beast. My teeth jolt together while we hit bump after bump. The windows rattle harder than my teeth, so hard I think they’ll just shatter in their frames. That the whole bus will crack in half like a child’s toy. I don’t know how long the shocks will hold up. Then we must hit one of the bumps just right, because the bus flips. Rolls end over end through the shaggy reddish grass. The small bus driver smiles my own smile back at me, and disappears.
The bus spits me out like a pit. The hillside is covered with birds’ nests. Baby birds all around me screech and stretch their mouths up, begging for food. I lie among them on my back. The sun is warm. The earth feels like it’s breathing.
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