Bus Stops and Dreary Evenings
Staring at the pavement, making small talk with strangers, as if doing these things would make the bus come faster. As if by clicking her red shoes together at their worn heels three times and saying, "There's no place like home," the screeching of brakes would at long last sound in her ears (a sound in her opinion more beautiful than the voices of one thousand winged seraphs in heaven). Then she could climb aboard her musty chariot and finally be on her way back to where she belonged. Not that there was anyone left to welcome her home.
Suspense mounted. The burning regret that now and again shot painfully across her chest was only matched in intensity by the burning of her parents' liquor rushing down against the sensitive tissue of her esophagus; so quickly it was sucked to the earth by gravity and desire that the heat she felt could have easily been friction. At this point it didnt really matter. All she could tell was her bus was still not here, and it was never going to come for her. She would sit at the bus stop all night, surrounded by stale cigarette butts and broken dreams, on a dusty bench with only the company of her dear friend (her only friend), Solitude, to console her.
It was 11:07 PM, and the single source of light, one orange-tinged street lamp, began to flicker, and finally with a decided "click!" snuffed it. The street was so dark that even her shadow had fled the night in terror; no friendly star gazed with sympathy upon her from up above, for they were all blanketed in thick folds of grey-black, tucked in soundly and sweetly sleeping, for they had their own solar systems to contend with in the morning.
She lay down on the bench and closed her eyes, the unfriendly metal arm rest pressing hard against her already aching skull. By now the bus driver must be snoring away in his king sized bed at home, comfortable and warm, the b*****d, she mused, angrily cursing the miserly earth she inhabited for mortgaging the stars and denying her body the deathly chill of a whistling wind; there were no physical distractions to keep her restless mind at bay.
From black, to brown, to red, to orange, to white, the color of her eyelids changed. A chorus of angels, hundreds of thousands of them, had never sung so menacingly at they did under the white light of her eyelids. Her shadow returned from its safe-haven, grew across the paved earth, before at last shrinking in fear and grief into nothingness before disappearing entirely. And everything came suddenly to a screeching halt, like the wheels of the bus, and lightness and darkness were, all at once, exactly the same.
0towa Madoka Community Member 
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