Worse Than Myself by Adam Golaski

Author:Adam Golaski [Golaski, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press
Published: 2014-03-26T23:00:00+00:00

THEY LOOK LIKE LITTLE GIRLS

The Greyhound bus slowed to 50 mph somewhere between Spokane and Missoula. There wasn’t much traffic on I-90, just trucks; their headlights emerged from the black curve of the horizon and then blew past, rocking the bus, spraying the bus with gravel. And so, each time a truck passed, the thirteen year-old girl (Kallista) woke. She was glad, though; when she dozed, she picked up the thread of the same bad dream. She’d been traveling for ten hours and it was much later than her accustomed bedtime (9 PM on school nights). She tried to read to stay awake, but she was so tired the book’d become all a jumble, one line twisting round the next.

The bus chug-chugged, jerked everyone forward and back.

The grad student (Genevieve) was undisturbed by the bus’s turbulence because she’d gulped down two Lortabs with a slosh of scotch just before she’d got on the bus. She’d be washed-out when she woke up, she knew, but she couldn’t face the ride and she hated chit-chat. Each time she drifted out of her blackout, into actual sleep, she ventured a little further along the course of her own bad dream.

The factory worker (Hammond), tired, longing for a smoke, was upright in his seat, rigid, stretched taut as if sprung, not eager to get off the bus but damned if the bus was going to make him late for his first day at the next factory, another lumber job; nicks on his face from wood chips shot through the air, sawdust in his lungs, sap and grease on his hands—one factory job to another, the next. He’d fallen asleep almost as soon as he’d boarded the bus just outside of Spokane, but had slept no more than an hour. He’d jolted awake and wouldn’t go back to sleep.

The recently retired history professor (Walter) was also wide awake. He sat with his back to the window, a thick knit cap between his head and the plastic window pane, and looked at Genevieve asleep in the seat across from him. For the past hour, he’d had two seats to himself, as did Genevieve, as did, he guessed, anyone still on the bus—in Spokane, most everyone got off. Only a few of us, he thought, are going on to the great cities of Montana. He’d attempted to make a sketch of Genevieve, but his eyesight wasn’t very good and the light on the bus was dreadful—hard, flat white, grainy as if sand had been tossed into the air. He didn’t presume to have intentions on the sleeping student, though imagined various conversations they might have.

The over-weight and over-friendly driver that had picked them all up, had been replaced in Spokane by another, a tall man whose cap cast his face in shadow. He spoke, for the first time, in a flat voice, low like the hum of the bus itself, but each word that tone carried was clear: “The bus is experiencing mechanical trouble. We will stop in Mullen, where another bus has been sent to take you to your final destination.

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