The Number 26

It looked no different from any other day. Barely ten people.

The old lady was there in her usual seat. The one behind the driver. He had never seen her get up. Or down. It was as if she was a part of the bus. A somewhat worn out mannequin someone had forgotten to take home.

Some of the other regulars were there as well. And then the usual set of two to three new faces. He never knew where these “new” people came from. Magically appearing for a day and then disappearing forever. Maybe they tried the bus and didn’t like it and went back to the underground. Most people preferred the underground. It was cleaner, safer and faster. Much, much faster.

He had tried the bus too. One day. All those years ago. But unlike most, he had tried the bus and stayed.

He liked the feeling of flying, or hovering to be more accurate. Wheeled vehicles had never made much sense on the surface of Luna. Hover-busses had been quite popular on the early days of settlement, before the Authorities had started building the underground.

He also liked the fact that it took almost two hours to reach the habitat from the mines. That meant that by the time he reached his module he had just enough time left to eat, watch the news on the tele, and go to sleep. No time to do anything else.

The routine was comforting. He didn’t want to have to think about what to do. The routine meant that he didn’t have to. It had been almost ten years now. Six days a week. Fifty-two weeks in the year. He hadn’t taken a single holiday even though his meager salary he had enough saved now to visit Earth, or even Mars (if he took one of the cheaper shuttles).

There was only once he had taken a break. About five years back. It was after one of the local journos had the bright idea of doing a feature on “Number 26 – Our Last Hoverbus”. The fact that it made it to the third page showed how little anything of interest happened on the mining colonies.

Anyway, the article had started out by mentioning how the Authorities had in their immense benevolence decided to continue running the bus (even though it was making losses) in memory of all those killed in the accident five years ago. Then it had included a three or four line profile on each of the regulars. The last one, “man in the last seat”, was about him.

The story had created enough of a buzz for the bus to be crowded with curious people over the next couple of days (again showing how little anything of interest ever happened here). And after the first day, he had decided to take a week off, just to keep away from those crowds.

They had got the story wrong anyway. At least his part of it. Typical crappy journalism.

The man who still travels every day on the same bus his partner had been killed on. She had wanted to take the underground but he had convinced her to take the bus. Still unable to forget his guilt, he travels on the bus, alone, on the same seat every day where one day five years ago they sat together.

That’s what they had said. It wasn’t correct. She hadn’t been his partner. He had just met her a few weeks back at the mines. It was true he had never met anyone like her before, or since. But they were not married or engaged or anything like that.

And it hadn’t been guilt. It had just been as if the world had moved on and he had got sat down.

And the report had been wrong about him asking her. It was she who had wanted to take the bus. After seeing the photo he had taken on the previous day (which had been his first day on the bus). She had wanted to see the Earthrise too.

Cheers to the passengers and travelers of May! As this is a blog of words, here are some beautiful words for the travelers out there.

Eleutheromania- An intense and irresistible desire for freedom.

Fernweh (German)- The feeling of being homesick for a place you’ve never been.

Trouvaille (French)- The stumbling upon Something lovely, or the discovery of something beautiful, by mere chance.

Waldeinsamkeit (untranslatable from German)- The feeling of being alone in the woods.

Sonder (A contraction of both German and French words from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)- the realization that each random passerby you pass- such as on the bus- is living a life as vivid and complex as your own

Onism (Danish)- The awareness of, even if you’ve traveled your entire life, just how little of the world you’ll actually get to experience.

Meraki (Greek)- Putting a little part of yourself into whatever it is you’re doing. Leaving little bits of yourself into everything you do and everywhere you go.

Yu yi (Chinese)- The desire to feel things just as intensely as you did when you were younger — before expectations, before memory, before words.

Thank god for the rain. It washes away all of the filth of this place, collects it all in dark tubes beneath the streets and carries it off to a place I don’t see and don’t have to think about ever again.

It rains hard here. It gets into your boots. Around here, when it rains, it pours.

Bottles and cans, and all manner of unwanted discarded things, substances, clumps, and piles, collect in cesspools around tiny barred cave entrances built into the roads.

One sip of this towns’ storm-water runoff would leave you drunk, stoned, high, and diseased for the rest of your life.

The clouds get all dressed up, they put on makeup, they puff up themselves like a prized hen out on the ocean before making their grand entrance. With all their white, black, and grey, they dressed for all the weddings, funerals, baby showers, and business meetings to be rained on today. They waltz in from the horizon like shining princesses down a marble staircase, always unfashionably early to the party.

People rush around, shouting, “Rain! Rain!”

Around here shouting “rain!” is like shouting “fire!” in a movie theater. People start frantically running about.

I see people ten stories up, reaching out their windows into alleys, risking their lives, trying to get their underwear off the clotheslines.

Old men sitting in silence at the bar look out the window and finally have something to talk about, they all turn to each other and say, “looks like rain.” before turning back to their beers and liquors in silence.

There’s no calm before the storm, around here, there’s chaos and chaos and chaos. It’s a chaotic ballet- like the Number 26 bus’ window wipers sliding in and out of each others space in perfect harmony.

I swear I’ve seen big burly construction workers dodging raindrops, never stopping their working, oblivious to the rain, they somehow always seem dry.

I’ve seen little kids getting swept down the road like a kite in the wind.

I’ve seen an old woman pull umbrellas out of her sleeves like a magician.

Sewer grates start to steam like the whole town’s a steamboat running down the river; sinking. We all sink together, and the rain gets into everything. It gets into your boots.

When the cloud hits land it hits it like a sack of bricks, like a thousand pianos falling off a thousand towers, like a big wet wrecking ball, it smashes into the whole city at once. You can see it coming, a big black wall sweeping in from the horizon and covering ground with godly speed. It charges at you like a line of calvary.

Few things can make you feel so small, it’s a humbling experience, watching that army of seemingly infinite raindrops. The size of the cloud is unfathomable. There’s no comparison, no reference point, nothing to help you gain any perspective, except it would seem the entirety of the world’s curvature.  From skyline to skyline, there’s nothing but black, grey, and blinding white. It’s a colossal, unstoppable, beast.

Like a mother coming to give you a bath, it sweeps in whether you want it too or not. All of our kicking and futile screaming insignificant to its power and authority. It says, “you will be clean now.”

Businessmen groan like unruly children as if to ask self-righteously, “how dare you make me wet?” They blame everyone they can- the weatherman- but the only thing there to blame is that great big beast lingering just off the coast. They shake their fist at it as it comes in undeterred, and they’re left shaking in their impotent rage, soaking wet, their dress shoes full of water, socks and feet forever wet.

Savvier businessmen run out onto the sidewalk selling ponchos and umbrellas to passerbys for five times the value. Like a hoplite, they’re surrounded by a shield wall of umbrellas, advertising how perfectly dry they still are. But when the wind really comes, it’ll snap the umbrellas back, making them perfect funnels for collecting the water. Their boots will be left soaking wet.

Even the bees stop working when it rains, but around this city, people never rest. You should see the grey men in their grey coats rushing down the street. You can see their internal debate raging behind their eyes, the question, should they break the old rule they learned in the halls of their grade schools? And burst into an unruly and forbidden run- going against all social graces. They stand at intersections, rain getting into their boots, hating themselves for being ruled by a tiny neon red hand flashing across the street.

Rain. An ineffable thing. The feeling of the rush of the wind hitting you and snatching the breath out of your mouth, the sound of the applause of a billion droplets bursting on the ground, rooftops, and branches. The trees dancing, and the leaves clapping together in their praise. The petrichor wafting out of the earth, and with the smell, old memories thought long forgotten but buried deep within.

Rain, impossible to describe, yet understood by everyone.

They say no two snowflakes are alike, and the same is true about droplets. Like different instruments, each makes a different pitter and patter as they fall. The result is the most magnificent symphony ever orchestrated. I swear if you close your eyes and listen you can hear each unique drop bursting.

The first few brave droplets always come much earlier than the rest. They pat the heads, backs, and shoulders of a certain few.

I see one of those few look up to the sky in disbelief and shout, “It’s raining!” to all those around to listen.

The one next to him looks up to the sky for proof. Her palms held open to the sky swaying back and forth, trying to catch invisible falling specks of water.

Then the wind comes. Suddenly. It steals newspapers, and skips off with them down the street whistling. It opens windows, and it slams doors. It snatches hats, and it ruffles hair. It puts out fires and stokes embers. And it touches everything.

It grows strong and rips through the streets with icy fury. It passes straight through walls, jackets, and skin. It shoots right through me, rattles around inside my ribcage, and freezes me from the inside out.  

I see an old man walking bent over into the wind, each arduous step bringing him two backward.

Just when I think the world’s about to crumble and everything’s going to get ripped apart the rain finally comes. It starts slow, with a pitter and a patter here and there, a snap, a pop, a tap on the shoulder. Then it builds. It gets faster. Before I know it there’s more water than air. I see people struggling to breathe through the droplets.

I see a girl spread her arms wide, her hands open to the sky with little birdbaths in her palms, her hair blowing in the wind, sticking her tongue out at the dark cloud, drinking in the sky between her laughs.

With the world getting ripped apart around her, she stands facing that huge cloud utterly undeterred. She stands invincible.

I watch it all pass through the handprint in the steam on the yellow window of the Number 26 bus.

It has been a year now that my partner and I have been undercover to find my friend Bailey’s killer, and it will all pay off soon. All we have to do now is finish this trip on bus Number 26.

Five years ago, my friend Bailey was taken, in broad daylight and thrown in the back of a van. Word around the streets was, he was mixed up in some fighting ring. I guess the people who had taken Bailey, figured as big and tough as he looked, that he would be perfect for fighting. Little did they know, Bailey left a life of being forced to fight when he was younger, he vowed to never fight again. Bailey would rather give his life than to ever have to fight again, and from what others said, Bailey did exactly that in his first fight. Gave up his own life during the fight. The other fighter had training, so when he killed Bailey, it wasn’t a fair fight anyway. We were told to keep an eye out for each other, because they were needing new fighters.

After that happened, it was only a year until I joined the Police Academy. This is when I met my partner I am with today. We went through the academy together and became the best of friends. We will do anything for each other, so when we heard about this street fighting ring starting back up, we both wanted in.

We both wanted in for separate reasons you see. I wanted in for Bailey, while he wanted in because he lost his best friend due to a street fighter. Now you see we both have someone to avenge. This past year, neither of us have had to fight, but tonight is the night that we get to meet the ring leaders behind all of the street fights in our town. Tonight we get to put a stop to their entire operation. After tonight, we will be able to go back to our old lives again, and be done with this way of violence and corruption we have been involved in for the past year. We just have to keep eyes on the other two passengers on this bus, Number 26.

They both know we are on the bus with them, but we were told not to seat near them, as it would draw too much suspicion, but we have our own thoughts as to why they don’t want us near them. We think they intend to trying to ditch us once Number 26 stops. See they know what stop to get off on and we don’t, so we just have to watch them, carefully. We don’t want to blow our cover as undercover cops.

All is going as planned, then all of a sudden the bus stops and our suspects jump out of their seats and try to exit the bus doors, but before they could the make their getaway, the bus Number 26 doors shut on them. It is if the bus knows that is not there stop. Since the bus wouldn’t let them out, we didn’t have to blow our cover, and they sat back down in their seats.

They did not try to make any other undue slips, until their actual stop with us, for they knew bus Number 26 wouldn’t allow them to leave for some reason, but we figured it was because this bus was the bus for revenge, and that is exactly what we are out for.

Thank you, Number 26. They did get what was owed to them and now Bailey and my partners’ best friend will rest easy for now on.

I think the driver of the 26 is an alien, because it's definitely not human.

I don't like riding that bus line but it's the cheapest way, and also the only way. Plus, this man goes where the coke flows. By which I mean Dave, he lives way out, another 25 minutes walk after I get off the bus, but that's like drifting on clouds serenaded by angels compared to the ride out.

The moment those bus doors open I'm sweating, and not just like damn, it's hot in this bitch, I'm talking those cold sweats you get when you know that you're seconds away from being pinched.

That dread that lead lines your stomach, weighing you down, making it impossible to run.

I throw the cash at it and keep moving, no eye contact, just muttering without saying anything.

All the other passengers, or pod people, turn and stare at me as I walk down the aisle and plant my ass on the bench seat at the back.

It has taken them, body snatcher style. I can tell by the eyes, they are all just like the drivers, mirrors peering at me from every face.

I think it's mind control vision. It never blinks, it's always watching. And I swear once when I was alone on the bus with it, its head turned all the way around like a ventriloquist dummy, just to watch me.

But it won't turn me into one of them. I won't go without a fight, I'll take it with me kicking and screaming into the depths of hell. Alien bitch.

I don't normally sleep much, you might even use the word “insomniac”, but I blackout at the same time every trip. I never feel it coming, I'm alert one minute and then out the next.

I don't know if it's for seconds or minutes but I start feeling hot, and I wake up to my heart trying to birth itself from my chest; then the bugs start. I know its her, crawling under my skin, slowly at first but the closer they get to my brain the faster they become. The heat, the heart, the itch, it's like a bad trip, and I would know, I've had a few.

Most times I make it off the bus in time to hurl; most times. When I don't, it just stares at me with all those eyes and slams the door.

I laugh out loud to myself. I'm safe, until the next time I have to take the 26.