The Next Stop

by John Cohle

She got on the empty bus at 1:15. AM. 1:15 AM at Jackson, near the Sears tower, after waiting next to the covered bus bench for 20 minutes, after her phone told her it would be 10, after her phone told her that the express 146 was still running then disappeared and left her with the 151. She got on the bus at 1:15, the 151, which had about 151 stops until she got home.

She wouldn’t have minded, either. Wouldn’t have minded that her charger had been unplugged and her phone died five minutes into the ride, or that it was 15 degrees outside and yet one of the bus windows was open, or that the wind blowing through it seemed to follow her to whatever seat she sat in. She wouldn’t have minded that she could have taken the red line, should have taken the red line, but last week that guy had done that thing when she was slumped half asleep against the window and ever since then the thought of riding the el at night had made her stomach a bit queasy. No, she wouldn’t have minded any of those things. She wouldn’t have minded them because it was Friday, and she was going home.

But then she had been leaving the office, leaving that conference room which stank of old sandwiches and Kelsey’s disgusting build-your-own sweet green abomination, and he had stepped out of his office, looking like he had just woken up and come in, like he had changed suits and shaved a minute before, and of all the things he could have said, he had said this:

“Goodnight Kelsey.”

And she had been tired, and not thinking, so she corrected him.

“I’m actually Cassidy.”

And he had paused. The gears churned. She saw them churning, which she thought was an indictment in of itself, this man who had the clean suit and the clean face and the clean salary yet he thought so slow that you could literally see it happening and she thought, how depressing, how depressing to be stuck in a clean suit and a clean face and a brain that you can watch churn like the wheel on an old sawmill. Then the gears clicked into place, and she saw that he remembered, that her body had been replaced with a big F for FUCK UP, since she had FUCKED UP that thing that didn’t even really matter but she had been associated with ever since.

“Cassidy!” He said “I was supposed to talk to you today.” He glanced at his watch, then back at her, like he was deciding whether it was worth griming up his suit with whatever dirty conversation he had been supposed to have with her. He glanced back up.

“But it’s late. We can do it on Monday.”

“That’s okay, I’m in no rush.” She said as her body screamed at her to leave, to rush, to go home and be home and forget about it.

“No, really. It’s late. Monday.”

And then because she was tired and because in that moment she hated him more than anything she had ever hated, she said “No, really, I can do it now.”

And then he smiled again, a smile that was reserved for idiots and simpletons, which she thought was rich, coming from him, but it was also a smile of power and evil and a smile from someone who had never felt pain, can’t have felt pain, because then how could he smile at another human being like that?

“See you Monday.” He said.

And now she was sitting in the back row of the bus, tired and wired at the same time, her stomach sick from the coffee and lack of food and from what his words had maybe meant and thinking if she was going to be this sick on the bus maybe she should have been sick on the el, because what were the chances of a stranger rubbing your thigh twice in the same week? She sat and she stared out the windows into the dark, at the alley rats, the windswept trash, at a Michigan Ave so empty that a tumbleweed could have rolled across the street and she wouldn’t have questioned it.

The bus crossed the river and stopped by the Tribune. She didn’t know if that was actually where the Tribune was, she assumed the newspaper probably had enough money left for three cubicles and a porta potty, not a building next to the river, but the bus stop was called Tribune, so she thought maybe it was the Tribune. And three people got on, or two people and a child, depending on whether you thought children fit the classification of people, which she did some days and didn’t on others, depending on how annoying her nieces and nephews were being.

The man that got on was not like that other man, the one who had ruined her weekend with his terrible smile and terrible words. His suit was not clean and his face was not clean, it was unshaven and he had dark purple bags under his eyes, which were magnified by the giant clear plastic lenses he wore over them. He was maybe fifty, and he must have been a reporter because he got on at the tribune stop, so he must have been. There was no other reason for a man who looked like a side character in Kolchak to get on at the Tribune stop at 1AM. He sat down in one of the seats that faced West, and she could see him tap the pack of cigarettes that bulged from his suit pants pocket.

The woman sat down in front of them both, in the seats that faced North. She was old, too old to be the mother of the smiling little boy who trailed behind her, who stomped every step to make his spiderman shoes light up. She had purple varicose veins in her neck, thin strips of purple that reminded Cassidy of the purple strips of cabbage mixed in with the carrots and paper-like-lettuce of old school lunch salads, which made her think of Kelsey’s rancid quinoa and barbecue sauce and cucumber salad, and the way that one piece of quinoa had stuck to her lip well past midnight and nobody told her because they all hated each other and hated that they were stuck working at midnight on Friday, and that little bit of selfish torture felt like a way to get some of their anger out, and all that made her think of the man and his sleek suit and sleek words and that he had ruined her weekend, because she hadn’t been going to drink this weekend, but now she had to, because otherwise she would spend all weekend worrying, so she could either worry and be anxious or have shitty drunk sleep and headaches and she would choose the latter every time.

The old woman was asleep before the bus moved, before the air pumps sneezed and lifted the bus back off the ground, before it slid back up past the sleeping shops of Michigan Ave. She could see the old lady’s eyes closed in the dim reflection of the window, the streetlights sliding over them like someone was pasting glowing retinas to the outside of her eyelids. She wanted to sleep too, and she knew the man wanted to smoke because he wouldn’t stop tapping that box, and neither of them did it because neither of them wanted to get in trouble, although she was worried about a different type of trouble than he was.

The little boy was the only person on the bus who wasn’t tired, including the bus driver, whose eyelids were so low that they looked closed in the rearview mirror. The little boy put his hands on the seatback and bounced up and down, his long dark hair dancing around his eyes, staring at imaginary battles and wizards and soldiers and kings that existed just outside of the window, both on the pavement and up in the lighted glass rectangles of the skyscrapers, where the boy knew the rooms existed in a golden forever, with jewels and mysteries, just like the apartments he had seen on TV or the places his dad read to him about from the chapter books, the chapter books he could almost read entire chapters of by himself.

The young woman looked away and imagined the opposite. She imagined all the nice apartments she would never own and the money she would never have, all the nights she had lost to work and all the coming nights she would miss, if she still had a job to miss them with. She imagined good things but only in a bad context, things she had once wanted and truly believed, not hoped but actually believed, she would have. She imagined a boat and blue water, and then it was replaced by an empty conference room and more slick suits and greasy smiles.

She tried to remember what the man had said. She tried to convince herself that he had said he “wanted” to talk to her today. That he “asked” if she would “have the chance” to talk Monday. But then the real memory butted in and it was like she was living it all over again, slamming into reality so hard it gave her whiplash. She felt sick. And she wanted to think it was because she was worried she might lose her job, but that wasn’t it. She felt sick because another person had lined up to say that she wasn’t good enough. She imagined all the people in that office, all the screw ups and sloths and creeps and she imagined herself at the head of the line, that they had decided out of all the lower-case fuck ups, she was the one that was the big F, the REAL FUCKIN DEAL, the one who deserved to be FIRED.

She heard a ding. They were still riding up Michigan Ave, not even to Water Tower yet and there wasn’t a soul in sight. The bus’s robotic voice rang out.

“STOP REQUESTED. HURON.”

She glanced at the Tribune man. He hadn’t looked up from the ground and she only knew he was awake because of the way his finger tapped at the thick rectangular protrusion. The bus screeched to a stop. No one moved, no one got off. The man didn’t seem to notice. She glanced further up the bus.

The little boy was kneeling backwards in the chair, his dancing eyes visible over the back of the seat. He was staring at the man, but the second she looked at him he turned to face her. They made eye contact, and the little boy raised his face a little higher so that his mouth was visible. He was smiling.

The doors closed and the air pumps flumed and the bus screeched forward. She looked away from the boy and back out the window, back to the sick in her gut and her ang-

“STOP REQUESTED. CHESTNUT.”

She looked back up. This time the man with the cigarettes did too. The bus driver didn’t seem to think anything of it, just kept staring forward.

The boy bobbed up and down, his body jumping with mischievous energy. The man with cigarettes stared for a second, then returned his eyes to the ground. This time she kept looking, making eye contact with the little boy as he grinned back. The bus stopped. No one got off. The driver didn’t look up. The air lift sneezed. The bus kept going.

The boy kept staring as he reached over the woman, who in her head was his grandma, towards the low looping wires strung over the windows. He giggled a giggle that was lost under the sound of the wheels banging over the potholed pavement, his hand just an inch from the wire.

The little boy thought they were in cahoots, grand co-conspirators in his prank. Her continual eye contact made him think that she was agreeing, that she was impressed and amused by his pulling the request stop wire. But she wasn’t. She was having the worst night of worst nights, and then the express bus hadn’t come, and she couldn’t take the el, and now this kid was going to pull every stop between here and timbuk tu and she wouldn’t get home until 5AM because his grandma didn’t care enough to wake up and stop him. And as his tiny hand got closer she wanted to scream, to scream at him to stop, to-

“Don’t!”

The cigarette man had one of those voices filled with a lifetime of anger, a lifetime of people beating up on them, telling them what to do and what not to do and how bad and stupid and worthless they were until they accidentally started to have the same voice of those that haunted them, a voice filled with so much vitriol and gunpowder that it was almost a physical thing, violent and backhanded. When he spoke, her body gave an involuntary start, a nerve tremoring on an anxiety tightened system, the man’s voice in the dark setting it off like a snapped rubber band. Her mind had never heard that voice before, but her body had.

The little boy’s face froze in fear, like when you catch a puppy peeing on the carpet. He had heard that voice too. His teacher, Mr. Roberts, had that voice and he used it when the other adults weren’t around. Then the parents came to the school play and were so impressed by how good, how well behaved the kids were, but they weren’t well behaved, they were just scared. And he was scared now too, because the man had scared him and his auntie was asleep and he knew he shouldn’t wake her up, so he looked towards the lady, the lady in the back who had seemed nice and who had been having fun with the joke, with watching him stop the bus with one pull of his finger even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to.

And she looked back at him, and she saw that he was scared and didn’t want him to be, because he shouldn’t be, because there was no reason to make him sad, not when all that we got in return was a little less anger or sadness for ourselves. She wanted to tell him that the man didn’t matter, that just because he was an adult didn’t mean he was right, didn’t mean that the little boy had done anything wrong. That he was okay. That he was okay trying to have a little FUN.

And she smiled at him. And the tears that were welling beneath the boy’s throat, in his chest and his lungs and his heart all started to move in reverse, returning to the space behind his eyes, going down his throat, back to his stomach where tears belonged and should stay and he smiled back, and forgot about the man’s voice. Because the lady had smiled, and he knew that meant it was all okay.

The little boy smiled back at her and suddenly it was all gone, all the sickness and the worry and the hatred she had felt since she left the office. She hoped Kelsey got home okay. She hoped the conference room was empty. She also hoped that the man in the suit got hit by a bus but that wasn’t really anger anymore, because she only wanted that to help the rest of them, so the rest of them in the conference room weren’t there again next Friday night, or Saturday morning, or whatever it was, and that maybe for once they could enjoy the weekend. Because everybody deserves to go home early on Friday.

But now she didn’t care about getting home early. She didn’t care about getting anywhere at all. She cared about this, about being happy on the bus at 1:30AM, about making sure that the little boy was alright. And maybe she would take Monday off anyway, maybe she would take the whole week off. She had leave time. And she had that old positive covid test, maybe she would send the man in the clean suit a picture of that test the week after and tell him she wasn’t coming in then, either. Maybe she would make it to the next payday and never come back. She knew she wouldn’t, but it didn’t matter, because right now she believed, not hoped, but believed, that she would.

She let out a little laugh and the boy laughed back. Then she made a small pulling motion. The boy glanced at the man. His magnified eyes ricocheted between the two of them, his fingers beating a high tempo march into the pack of cigarettes. But it didn’t matter. The lady was laughing. She thought he was funny. He reached for the wire. He was going to stop the bus.

BIO: JJohn Cohle is twenty-eight years old and lives in Chicago, Illinois. He has forthcoming publications in the July 26th edition of Sky Island Journal and the July 30th edition of Cetera Magazine.