It was a throwback to my bus-riding years, though it seemed to be present day. The bus was packed like a midweek New York subway, but this was Detroit or one of its neighboring suburbs; most likely Madison Heights. I was sitting to the right of an older couple; a man and woman probably in their 60s.

I assumed they were husband and wife. All I knew was that the man was holding a wooden cane, which he mistakenly dropped amidst all the bumping and rocking we were doing on the John R potholes. The noise it made when it fell and tumbled to the back of the bus was loud enough for all near to hear.

“Did you need it to get off the bus,” I think the woman asked him, to which he replied with a simple “Yeah”. The problem was that the bus wasn’t made like a normal bus. There was seemingly no walking aisle in the middle. We were all just clumped together; a dense crowd of people facing different directions.

To get off, you had to wiggle your way thru the crowd, which is what the people to my right stood to do as I stood to go in the opposite direction. We all had to exit the same way, but I, feeling more altruistic than I may’ve in real life, was going to get his cane. “Excuse me,” I said, “I’m going this way.”

The missing middle aisle was actually a short section at the back of the bus; a recent addition apparently designed for this very reason. It was a sort of strip with no seats beneath the back windows where you could bend down to the floor to look, crawl and reach for things that fell and rolled back there.

I remember scanning from left to right, seeing nothing but legs; I was looking underneath where people were sitting; when a voice said to me, “There it is.” It wasn’t in my head though. It was the man who dropped the cane, leaning of my shoulder or back for support. He’d followed me to go look for it.

When I went to grab it, the scene changed. I was still on the bus, but the back wall was replaced by a large room with a table of what looked like employees on a smoke break. One of them looked exactly like Shameka; I’m probably spelling it wrong; one of the twin sisters I worked with at Burger King.

That was my first job. I was 15 or 16 at the time and they weren’t much older. That’s probably why she didn’t seem to recognize me as I grabbed the cane on a bus magically connected to either her current place of employment or that same Burger King from the past. She certainly noticed me though.

I was dressed up in a suit; something I’ve never done and probably never will in real life; and she made a comment about me looking sexy in it. She was apparently talking to her co-workers, but they were sitting right there beside her and she said it loud enough for me, several feet away, to hear.

I heard what she said but pretended I didn’t and asked her what she said, but she didn’t hear me as they were looking at each other laughing about what she said. I handed the man his cane. “Thank you,” he said, which I responded to by telling him I was glad the bus added that little section in the back.

2026 March 01