The metal was hot under her cheek, painfully so, it drew her slowly back to wakefulness. She had stretched out from her seat, to rest her head against the window sill, watch the landscapes of north eastern America flit by like primitive animation, running round a wheel: corn, cows, industry, forest, corn, cows, industry, forest. And out, away, into other dreams of geography. God, what a wide, wide country it was, and how long this trip was taking, and would take. She wished, fervently, that she was home.
She read perhaps a dozen paperback romances, pilfered from the gray-haired woman in the next berth. In the cafeteria car she smiled blandly at the young men who flashed by, smiled at the tiny children escaping their mothers, smiled at the gray-haired woman from the next berth.
And when it was all over, it felt as if she had blinked the days away, and there was still a hole in the pit of her stomach.
**********
There as a salt tang to the air as Star
stepped off the bus in her mother's home town. The headiness of it turned
her stomach, and brought bile up into the back of her throat. Around her,
car doors were slamming as the few others who had disembarked with her met up
with their rides, but, as she looked about, her aunt was not apparent.
She sighed, unhappily.
The sun had set an hour or more ago and, though it was summer, the night was growing cool. Clouds had been gathering throughout the day, joining her own westward progress at about noon, when she had first boarded this bus after finally freeing herself of the cross-country train, and now obscured any light from the heavens. All was dark and foreboding in the already abandoned terminal.
It was a tiny, filthy building, and its condition reminded her sharply that she was far from home. There, harsh fluorescent lights blinded the eyes to the litter of wrappers, drink containers, and tired human beings. Here the yellow bulbs buzzed slightly as they struggled to illuminate the trash and shadow of what was, for all intents and purposes, a glorified underpass.
A sudden, undeniable, and yet thoroughly embarrassing paranoia struck Star, and she shuddered. She was alone in this little hole of a place in the middle of nowhere. She had God only knew how long a wait before her and all the world about her was dark, unknown, and hostile. She slunk away from the curb, to put the solid wall of the terminal at her back, and stared about her again. She was alone, as far as she could tell, but her fear would not leave her. She hated it, violently. She was a dead woman already, what did she have to fear? What could harm her anyway, now? The thoughts were miserable, bitter, childish, but they set a burning, if unreal, sense of perspective. She wanted this unfriendly night to try and hurt her now, she did not care.
"Come on," she laughed, madly, "come at me! Well, I'm-"she choked up, tears streamed madly down her face, and glistened in the headlights of the approaching car.