[ WP ] `` The bus did n't stop but their lives did . ''

In the rushed morning winter air, wind swept through the smell of burnt tea and fried onions, there was n't time even to find a missing half to a pair of mittens, somewhere hidden in the slush of boots and trailed in leaves. Time to go, all the morning was dark as a night before death, but the orange haze of streetlamps seemed to keep everything inside a shallow shell, kept sheltered from some endless abyss that you could peer into for miles or reach out and touch without ever really knowing the difference. Time passes quickly through a sleeping stream of senseless jumbles, in words and pictures, and though the cold was already creeping up the boy's fingers, he could stay almost asleep through the parts of his body that all remembered the warmth of a bed so recently and warmly and sweetly wrapped up in. 
 
 Yet every breath of wind seemed to climb up through him right up to the steaming release of the break from that burly mammoth kneeling down beside him. Something to hold, some moment to stay in, somehow a pause more meaningless in anticipation could have been wrapped up and stored in a million memories more than any fleeting, touched moment of adventure or victory, the memory of memories as one waits out in the cold. The break between the past and present where nothing new has to enter into things. For a brief moment memories and dreams and the standing on some hollow corner of the world, perhaps desolated from all existence for all the senses now knew, could sit lightly on the end of some spiderweb, trapped in time. The boy sat, not yet knowing what to do, not knowing either whether to draw himself out of sleep though it was what he woke for. In the passing orange lights that seemed to pass, in sequence, over all the children's faces on the bus, seeming to scan them for some future use, he caught some mysterious fleeting smile beside him as a hand crept up on top of his. Now driving out into the darkness, the road fell out from beneath them, but no one seemed to notice or mind. The bus did n't stop, but their lives did. 
 

