flash fiction: tragic bus
adalyn lay there on the road, where the paramedic named ben found her, and she grabs his arm and asks him whether she would be okay — ben only shakes his head and looks through a bag, other paramedics swirl around but not paying attention to her, instead other people on the bus — adalyn asks what it was, the thing that hit the bus, but ben doesn’t respond while searching through his bag still, and he pulls out a roll of bandage and then a roll of tape, he smiles at his delayed discovery and he shakes his head, he says he thought he almost forgot to check his bag earlier —
adalyn asks again what hit her
or the bus, and ben winding the gauze around her bleeding upper arm says apparently some rock, a big one, probably rolled off the mountain, ran over their bus, and just kept rolling — adalyn says, yes, yes, like a rolling stone — she asks if he knows where vlasta is, her friend, she was sitting next to her in the bus, they were talking about something like buying well underwear, looking online for some prices, ha, the funniest things we talk about no? ben shakes his head and smiles and says well everyone needs to buy underwear but usually guys do that by themselves or their moms or girlfriends or wives buy it for them, and adalyn says yes well that’s the truth, but vlasta has this longish yellow shirt on kind of a blouse and white pants couldn’t miss her nobody wears anything like that —
adalyn on her back on the yellow double line in the middle of the road
sees a plane fly overhead, initially that’s what she thought, that a plane hit the bus, not some huge united airlines plane or anything like that but something like some small plane, the ones with a propeller in the front, more like a flying car than anything, maybe holds 2 people, and that maybe there was some student in the plane flying for the 2nd or 3rd time or something like that, and just lost control, hit the brakes when he should have revved up the engine, she doesn’t know she’s never learned anything about flying planes, but planes hit buses and buses hit cars and cars hit deer and deer eat grass, we’re all being chased by something — but a rock sounded so large and booming, no doubt ben was making it up, because when your arm is scarred or burned or whatever then you just want answers, and a paramedic knows that whatever answer is given will be forgotten anyway —
the thing is that was it, the rock was a lie
they’re looking into it but something blew out of the side of the bus, they’re thinking a bomb exploded, hidden in one of the suitcases in the bus’s underbelly storage, vlasta died, adalyn just finds out in her hospital bed about vlasta, and she vaguely remembers someone said something about a rolling stone, that just keeps going, but no her boyfriend ruvim here sitting by her shows her his phone, a hole blown out of the side, right under where adalyn and vlasta were sitting together, she tells him yes that makes sense, the noise, an explosion, like a plane hitting them — ruvim tells adalyn that half the people on the bus died, and looks like all adalyn will get is a scar on her arm, she’s lucky, the bus driver not so lucky, vlasta looking for cheap underwear, a simple conversation, and maybe her last thought —
