Last Bus

Rain falls.

The plaza shines under sodium lamps, and the air smells like wet metal as I hurry toward the idling bus whose display stutters, then holds on one word: LAST.

I tap my card.

The driver lowers her cap; her voice stays even and near.

“End of the line,” she says, and the line sounds final because the bus hums like a closed door.

I sit midway.

Damp wool clings to the seats, and the window carries my ghost beside a stripe of city light while a few riders hold to their own weather: a sleeping kid, a scrolling nurse, a man gripping a thin plastic bag as if it holds heat.

No route names appear.

We slip off the usual streets and nose down a ramp that hides behind warehouses, then into lanes with old reflectors that tick under the tires like slow beads on a string.

The nurse pulls the cord.

The bell still works, so the driver lets fog climb the steps; the nurse steps out to a nowhere shoulder and turns left, certain of left, certain of fog.

Silence spreads.

The kid wakes, touches his hands as if testing ownership, and leaves at the next not-stop where cattails lean and water breathes.

Ads are gone.

Blank rectangles hang above us like peeled labels, faint outlines of promises pressed flat by time.

I ask the driver where the line ends.

“Where it always has,” she says, and her mouth almost smiles, not at me, but at the idea of rearranged scenery that keeps the same horizon.

Signs pass without letters.

Another carries letters from a bent alphabet, smooth as stretched smiles, and the wipers keep time for a song I won’t learn.

The man stands.

“Next,” he says, and steps off toward a single lamp by a wooden platform; his bag cradles bread, not a heart, yet he whispers, “Still warm.”

Darkness gathers.

Inside, the bus glows like an aquarium at night, and my reflection stacks over black glass while memory presses its cold coin to my tongue: Milo’s thumb circling my knuckles in long grocery lines.

I do not pull the cord.

Stops drift past like curated scenes: a field of wet white laundry, a chain of empty playgrounds, a booth where a woman takes folded cranes instead of cash.

Then the display wakes.

Static lifts, and WELCOME forms like a mat for thoughts, and a town slides into view—clean lines, pruned edges, no flyers, no tape, only the parts that look like a memory of a town.

The doors sigh.

“End of the line,” the driver says, and I step into air that tastes like sugar and rust while the engine thrums through my shoes like a waiting animal.

I walk to the diner.

Neon steam loops above a cup, and a man with an ordinary face sets coffee in front of me as if I had asked and chosen.

“On the house,” he says.

“Until you decide,” and he nods to the opposite booth where Milo sits with rain bright in his hair and the same small tilt that always asks if I was okay.

This can’t be real.

“Place for getting off when there’s nowhere else,” he says, finishing my thought with a voice that turns the booth into a room I once lived in.

I clutch the mug.

Heat bites my palm, and the bite feels right, because the alternative is a perfect dream that steals rather than gives.

“What’s the fee?” I ask.

The man looks out at the waiting bus and says, “Something that hurts you stops hurting; something you needed goes missing,” and his shrug moves like a practiced dance.

I stare at Milo.

I could inventory him forever: the scar under his chin, the tidy fold of his hands, the laugh that lifted badly sung radio hooks; I could live in the amber and call it life.

Loss stays honest.

We don’t choose which screw backs out or which word fades; we only learn the wobble when the floor shifts.

“It’s raining,” Milo says.

I laugh, then cry, and the laugh feels borrowed from his pocket, light and familiar and impossible to keep.

I stand up.

“I have to catch my bus,” I tell the man, who slides me a blank napkin like a ticket that takes ink later.

The driver waits.

“Fare,” she says, and her almost-smile returns when I ask what to pay with, because she already knows the answer I said without saying.

The reader chirps.

Quietly, like a small bird behind a wall, and the town folds behind us into ordinary night while the road unspools its damp thread back toward names I understand.

My phone wakes.

The lock screen shows a beach with no people, and the image should lacerate, but instead it stretches like a cramped muscle that lengthens toward relief.

We stop at my corner.

I leave the bus and enter rain that has been waiting to know me; the doors close on a breath that sounds like a decision choosing its next rider.

Home receives me.

Keys turn, a hallway halo burns, water starts to boil just because hands need tasks when hearts come back late.

A note waits by the kettle.

My handwriting leans into the wind: Last Bus. End of the line. Fare paid. I don’t recall the pen, only the ease that follows the words.

Brakes whisper some nights.

When they do, I picture riders counting what they can bear to lose, and I choose the smaller animal: I walk, and the rain trots beside me without teeth.