Creative February 21 - The wrong bus

(flash fiction)

The wrong bus

She was late and therefore ran to the bus-stop. A bus was just pulling in and she glimpsed a ‘3’ at the end. ‘What luck!’ she thought, that she could catch the bus after all. She got in, swiped her card and was surprised to see that the bus had many empty seats. Usually she has to hunt for a free seat at the back of the bus. She plopped down into a window seat with the seat beside her empty, reached into her bag for her novel and started to read. She had a good half-hour before her stop arrived and she was at the climactic point in the novel.

When she looked at her watch, 20 minutes had passed. She glanced out the window and a stab of panic lanced her heart. The landscape outside was frighteningly unknown and the realisation came swiftly that she had caught the wrong bus. But just to confirm she turned to her neighbour, a man who had taken the seat sometime along the journey and whose seating she had barely noticed. “Which bus is this?” she whispered.

He looked up from his own book and looked at her, recognition flooding his eyes. “Marya?” a huge grin was already dimpling his face and his eyes were twinkling with light. The years melted right before her eyes and she was back in high school and dating Peter but things were not going good and they were breaking up and going their separate ways. And now here he was, looking at her as if he wanted badly to give her a hug.

A year later they are married. And whenever she starts to tell the story with “one day I got into the wrong bus ….” He interjects laughingly, ‘the right bus, say, the right bus.”

~~~

P.S. After I wrote this my mind said, ‘What’s the point, where’s the moral of the story?” My inner voice says, “the Universe is a playful place. Be playful.” Amen to that!