FICT_003: autumn

The bus stops up at the crossroads, where the old sheep drovers' track meets the big road linking the two nearest towns. She's going to head north east: the town there is near the sea, which she's never seen, but would like to, and it's on the main railway line. She can get anywhere from there.

It's pitch dark by the time the bus comes, lights white through the light rain, scouring the tarmac with a sweeping, cold dazzle. She reaches back into the darkness of the wooden shelter, feeling for her rucksack, dragging it across the damp floor of rough planks, and imagining the woodlice and spiders back there in the rotting, scuttling dark. The moist, soft, familiar smell of home almost makes her choke, but then the bus door guffs open on its gas strut, spilling orangey light onto her shoes as she steps up, over the cold puddle that's draining into the gutter.

The bus's windows are steamed up, but she swipes a clear arc on the glass and cups her hands into a shielded tunnel of reflection-free darkness, trying to see the landscape through the wet night outside. The bus sweeps a corona of light in front of it, but, to the side, she catches the pale smear of the passing hedges, distant yellow farmhouse lights, and -- once, she's sure, just before she falls asleep -- the grey swoop of an owl's wings.