The bus experience is, of course, never pleasant. That isn’t the word that any seasoned city dweller or “townsperson,” would ever use to describe it. A tourist, maybe. Someone taking in the “local sights” with wonder and maybe even a sense of joy because they had never seen those sights before. Amelia was not such a person. She had seen the so-called sights—all of them, every last one—many times. If it were up to her, she would never have to see them again…the “sights” or the people of this godforsaken town. A middle-of-nowhere town on a middle-of-nowhere island where the sole mode of transportation, for those without a car (an environment-killer, as a scant few on the island had taken to calling any vehicle), was the motherfucking bus.

It was hard enough to rely on the unreliable bus as a person with “nowhere in particular” to be, but “God” help you if you actually needed it to get to work, to be at a specific place at a specific time (whether that place was what contributed to your livelihood or not). Yet Amelia had managed to do just that for years. Ever since she had turned sixteen, really. That was when she had gotten her first job as a “beach assistant,” tasked with laying out deck chairs and umbrellas for people—tourists—who would never understand what it was to hate “paradise.” But, as someone somewhere once said, “It’s a fine line between heaven and hell” (just as it’s a fine line between love and hate, as someone else somewhere else once said). The more she had to be around these people—the people who “loved” this “paradise” she simply called her hellish home—the more she felt like she might burst into flames. And not just because it was always burning hot on this island in the sun (so hot that any reasonable person might mistake it for Hades rather than ouranós), but because it enraged her to see stupidity all around her. Not just in the residents, but in those who came to visit. Almost as if stupidity were a disease you couldn’t avoid catching once you set foot on the island.

That, and perhaps “demonic tendencies.” That’s what the baby on this bus she was riding home from work made her surmise, and not for the first time. Oh sure, the bus was usually always chock-full of babies (that was the one thing the people on this island truly were good at—propagating). Typically crying, screaming ones. That was nothing new. But what felt new today was the sustained, indefatigable nature with which this particular baby kept crying. Yet perhaps even more unsettling than the sound of this probable demon spawn was the sight of its mother, just sitting there toward the front of the bus (reserved in general for the disabled and the pregnant, though those with a stroller were also given seating preference) with a look on her face that seemed to indicate she had given up not just on this child, but on life itself. In short, there was “no one home” anymore. The lights didn’t even seem to be on either, with her eyes intermittently closing, the mark of someone who hadn’t truly slept in months, or maybe even years.

All the while, the creature in the stroller kept screaming, letting out sounds the likes of which surely only an exorcist had ever heard before. Which meant there was a good chance at least someone on this bus was inculcated by the sound, for this was an island rooted in Catholicism. Slowly, Amelia glanced behind her (she being situated more toward the middle part of the bus) to see if maybe there was a priest on board, someone who could stop this ghastly entity from continuing to emit the possessed-sounding gurgles and shrieks that reverberated from the main hole inside its head. But no, to her dismay, there was no priest. Probably the one time she actually wanted there to be one around, he was nowhere to be found.

As a matter of fact, the streets and buses were often teeming with them. This was because there were a number of rectories scattered throughout the island, which meant no shortage of espying priests in the sort of “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” (though in this case, “Holy Men—They’re Just Like Us!”) fashion that made the tourists gawk at places like the supermarket, the gas station or, yes, even the beach, where men of the cloth sometimes shepherded children attending the rectory’s summer school program…while still sporting their signature soutanes and clergy collars. It was quite a sight to behold, almost like seeing a gaggle of ravens on hot white sand. The image—the contrast—was incongruous, and yet right at home in a place as absurd, as inexplicable as this.

A place where a baby could go on and on screaming and screaming (or perhaps caterwauling is the better word for what this beast was doing) in a public space without its mother doing a goddamn thing to even attempt soothing it. That was perhaps what was the most infuriating to Amelia: the fact that the woman couldn’t even be bothered to consider the level of annoyance her demon spawn might be causing other people. Amelia, childless herself (as it should probably go without saying—as if she would deign to “mate” with anyone on this island), wondered what it would take to reach the kind of nadir this woman clearly had in order to be so shameless. So utterly unbothered by the hate radiating from that many other people, all aimed right in her general direction. In a certain sense, it must be liberating to give absolutely no fucks about what others thought of you or, more to the point, your parenting skills (read: apparent lack thereof).  

Amelia, who had been on the bus for about thirty minutes now, could practically taste her stop coming, just two away now. She even started to get up from her seat in advance, just so that she could approach the door and essentially jump off the bus, thereby relearning what silence—golden silence—meant again (unfortunately, she had also picked a hell of a day to forget her headphones at home). And then, just as the bus driver was about to stop where she needed to disembark, the mother totally snapped. Went on a complete verbal and physical rampage against the child to the point where, yes, it finally was quiet. Once and for all. The irony of the mother much too belatedly “doing this solid” for the rest of the bus was that it led them to be further inconvenienced—perhaps even more so than they had by the demonic squalling—by the police’s insistence on all passengers remaining on the bus until every last one of them had been questioned.

By the time Amelia got home, it was already midnight, and she would soon have to wake up again to ride the bus. No doubt being subjected yet again to some demonic child. Maybe every child on this island was doomed to be characterized as such. Something about being born in such hellish temperatures contributing to their inherently choleric temperament. With the parents of these children themselves prone to snapping at a moment’s notice, also because of the extreme heat, which made them all the more irritable. In this regard, many of the babies on the island were lucky if they made it to a double-digit birthday.