Alone again, the laughter behind changing naturally to sighs, I find my way blocked by a yellow school bus. The door opens revealing my demon driver who motions me forward, warning, “Don’t mess up the seats.”
I walk down the aisle of the empty bus and take an outside seat. At the next stop Lori Anne, grade 2 hair-stroker, steps on the bus. Ignoring me, she sits on the opposite side. Next is Barbara, first girlfriend with all of the latent love lost a grade 5 romance offers, followed by Belinda; my albino flasher, Jane; first kiss, braces invitingly displayed, Devon; teen queen, Deirdre; unsuccessful eighteen-year-old seductress, and Lisa; soon to be lesbian. The seats across the aisle fill with life’s loves lost, whispering and giggling, fussing and preening, alluring and untouched.
At the next stops board the odious, the outcasts, and the underdogs. Bill McClintock stumbles to a seat. Eric, who spent his childhood masturbating, squeezes by to take the window seat beside and resumes his pastime. Ted, who wore his Eagle Scout uniform to university classes. Gerald, who wore fuzz-ball sweaters and rode a girl’s bike. Soon my side fills with a cluster of unfortunate souls. We are the unfortunate and infamous grouped together, merged, in a single, fateful world, les misérables.
As the bus reaches its final stop, she alights, Balkan breeze fluttering, crimson hair flowing, gypsy hips undulating, boundless thighs untaken. As I reach to squeeze her swaying skirt, Eric has a culminating event. The lily white droplets are propelled towards Belinda’s welcoming lap, and les misérables follow them across the aisle, welcomed on the far side by the unrequited. Encouraged, I cross the divide from skirt to leg. As my fingers move higher, my dream girl laughs, hikes her skirt freeing Medusa hairs, wrenches herself free, mounts a broom, and pogo-sticks her way through the entangled bodies and out the back of the bus. I follow, but fall, back to the anteroom, past a languorous Voelot sprawling, phallus sprouting, growing branches, sprouting leaves.