Sweet Romance16 min read
The Last Bus at Eleven — A Year of Voices
ButterPicks9 views
I wake to the same small voice each night.
"Driscoll… it's cold. I'm in the bus. Plate ends with 5845… help me."
"Camila?" I whisper into the dark, and the apartment answers with the faint hum of a refrigerator. I play the voice again. I press my thumb against the screen as if touch could hold her there.
"Don't be a fool," she said to me once, laughing when I stayed up too late patching a leaky faucet. "You always make the house sound like a battle report."
"What bus are you on?" I asked that night before she left the clinic.
"377," she said, quick and warm. "Last one. I'll be home soon. I brought medicine. Kiss."
"I'll be there," I promised. Then I got sick and couldn't go.
"Don't worry about me, Driscoll," she said, kissing the phone at the end of the line. "I know how to get home. Love you."
"Love you," I said, and I meant it like breathing.
She never came home.
The first morning, a man with a badge said, "We found a body, sir. Please come identify." His name tag read Peterson.
"Where?" I asked. My voice broke on the word.
"In the northeast," he said. "Around a three-thousand-kilometer distance from here. We thought you should—"
"Three thousand kilometers," I said. "Nicolas, you must be wrong. I'm in the Jiangsu area, Camila works at the downtown clinic. She takes the last bus when I'm not there. There's no way—"
"I'm sorry," he said, and his mouth was a place that swallowed the rest of his words.
When I saw her—when I saw that stillness—I wanted the world to split. They told me they found her in an old graveyard, face up on a slab. I got off the train like a man walking through spool after spool of cotton rope, wound too tight and frayed at the edges. I held her and wished the cold could be only a winter that would pass.
"How did this happen?" I asked the investigators.
"She was last seen boarding bus 377 at eleven," Nicolas told me. "The line's last run is supposed to be ten o'clock, but footage shows a 377 with plate ending 5845 entering a tunnel and… vanishing."
"Vanishing?"
"Yes. Radar shows nothing after that. Then, a few hours later, her body is found here."
I spent the days afterward like someone suspended in a room of white noise. Her voice haunted my phone: a loop of little voices—"I'll be home soon," "Kiss," then, weeks later, a voice that had no business existing at all: "Driscoll… help me… I'm on the bus."
"Driscoll—" she sounded small. "I don't know where it goes. The driver doesn't speak. Plate 5845. I can't find the door."
Every night at eleven the same thing happened. An audio file would appear on my phone, timestamped during the hours when no one else seemed to notice. I saved one, then another. When I tried to show the officers, the files vanished by morning from the logs. Only I had them each midnight. Only I could hear that exact crack in her voice.
"You're not making sense," my sister's boyfriend said when I played one of the messages for him.
"Listen," I said. "This is Camila."
He listened and then he looked up with wet eyes. "That's her."
"How can you be sure?" he asked.
"Because," he said, "her laugh is like the way she says 'Kiss'—you remember? It squeezes at the end. No one else does that."
So I quit my job. I put all my time and money into half-hungry searches. I combed bus depots, I rode buses, I camped at the station bench late into nights, whispering into the cold, hoping for a ghost or a clue or the sound of that old diesel engine. I found only stories.
"Old 377," the depot clerk said, lighting a cigarette as if to punctuate the name. "I remember a bus with a plate ending 5845. Came from the northeast—an old model. Five years ago a woman leapt from a window on a run and died."
"Three years ago the driver on that bus died of a heart attack."
"Engine problems, bad wiring. Old bus. We scrapped it."
"Scrapped?" I said, holding the clerk's smudged hand with a hunger he could not return.
"Yeah," he said. "They said the bus was too old. Nobody wants those any more. Gave up on it."
But the photos on my phone, the repeated voice messages, and the evidence were stubborn. The night the bus should have been gone forever, it arrived.
It came at eleven on March twentieth—the anniversary of the night my worse-life began. I waited at the stop until the air fell like something heavy. The streetlights were dim, and for an instant I thought the world had been folded small and put away.
"The 377 is late tonight," someone said on the bench near me.
"Nobody drives it after ten," I told the woman. "Please wait."
Then—at the edge of hearing—an old engine coughed and clattered. The headlights carved a small, reluctant moon shape into the road. A bus rolled slowly toward us, numbered 377 across its crown. On the back, dust spelled out "5845" like a wounded number.
My heart ricocheted. The bus stopped and the door opened like an invitation.
"Come on," something in me said. "This is it."
I got on.
It was colder inside than outside. The driver was thin as a thread and pale as milk, with eyes that looked like they'd seen too much and had nothing left to show. He didn't turn the cab light on.
"Where does this bus go?" I asked. My voice snapped.
He did not answer. He didn't look at me. He moved the gear and we rolled.
When we entered the tunnel, the world went thin. The red car in front of us disappeared like someone had cut it out of the air. The phone signal died. The bus filled with people—people I had never seen. They wore uniforms and masks, stage makeup and old coats. An old man with a cigarette that burned like coals sat by the window; two performers in opera makeup sang without sound; laborers with soiled hands stared at nothing.
"Who are you?" I demanded.
They didn't answer. They opened their mouths the way people open shutters, but no sound came. The passengers were pale and wrong. They were present and not present, like actors playing people who had been whispered out of time.
"You're ghosts," I breathed. My hand found the seam of the seat.
"You're alive," the thin driver said suddenly.
He had a voice but no face for speech, just the gravity of old things. "You don't belong," he added, like an explanation.
"I'm taking this bus to the person I love," I said. "This bus took her. It stops here."
The driver kept his eyes on the road. Outside, the tunnel stretched like a throat. The bus moved forward like a stubborn memory.
Then another 377 slipped alongside us—exactly the same, filled with the same people; in its rear seats a woman was waving a phone like she was calling for help. I recognized the angle of her waving, the way she held her hands—Camila.
"Camila!" I screamed. I reached out of the window and pounded on her window until my fingers stung.
She looked up. Her eyes said everything and nothing—they were a map I could not read.
The other bus disappeared as if someone had unbent the air and folded it away. We drove on alone.
"You're late," a ghost voice said from behind me. "He shouldn't have come."
"Who is 'he'?" I demanded.
"Time," said the thin driver.
I felt the bus slow at the edge of the tunnel. The lamps outside flickered. The highway became an open plain; the city fell away like a peeled skin. We stopped at the side of the road and the passengers moved as if melancholy were a muscle. Their feet tapped without sound, their eyes widened until the whole black felt filled.
"Are you alive?" I asked the old man with the cigarette.
He smiled without teeth. "We were," he said. "Once."
"Where is she?" I asked, and the anger in my voice was as powerful as other people's grief.
"You see what you are looking at," he said. "You are in a place that remembers a night. That night remembers you."
I slapped him. The sound cracked like a small gunshot in the bus. He shrieked, a sound like porcelain dropping—and it wasn't his sound alone. The bus erupted. They clawed at me, at each other, at the door. I was a man possessed by a single, unsharp instrument: the wish to make them bleed.
"I want Camila back!" I yelled bitterly. "You took her! Return her!"
I grabbed at a performer in white makeup. "Why would you hurt her? Who are you to take my wife?" My hands squeezed and the white face smeared like paint.
"Why are you fighting ghosts?" the driver asked quietly.
"Because they took her," I said. "Because ghosts are cowards when faced down."
I remember the match in my pocket, the way fire flamed like a small perfect blade when lit. I touched it to the cushion. The flame ate the seat. Smoke filled the bus. The passengers howled with something like rage and also like a hunger to be free.
"Burn them," I said to myself. "Burn the thing that stole her."
I held the driver by the collar and shoved him toward the flames until his head rested on the seat and he howled like a thing undone. Their faces twisted in terror. They tried to run, but the fire pushed them back like a tide. They stood pressed against windows that rationed escape, tapping like birds.
Then the world unclipped.
I was on a cold grave slab. The wind used language like a knife. My hand clutched a yellowed photograph like an amulet.
The photograph had faces: men, women, workers, a stage performer—my bus companions now. In the corner, their ages were younger, sanity more intact. A tiny label read "1993 Zhanghai Cotton Mill—Group Photo." A name scrawled on the back made my lungs drop: Camila's name—Camila Albert—written with the same looped handwriting my wife had used years before in notes to me. But 1993? My Camila was born decades later.
My phone showed 3 a.m. I was three thousand kilometers away from home. The cemetery breeze tasted like iron.
I staggered down to the village at the foot of the hill, clutching the photograph. I found a municipal woman who knew the mill.
"Do you know these people?" I asked, thrusting the picture forward until she took it. Her face turned like a stage prop.
"Oh, of course," she said. "Those are old faces. That girl—Camila—worked at the mill and was strange. She cried that day, kept saying she wanted to go home. Then the bus—"
"The bus?" I repeated.
"The bus took them that night after the gala," she said. "We had a performance, the mill put on a show. They packed us into a bus—the 377—to send us back. After that, a tunnel collapsed and—"
"Excuse me," she said, looking carefully at me, like a woman reading a coin. "What is today to you?"
"March twentieth?" I said, and my heart began to beat too fast. "Yes."
She looked at me like the floor had shifted. "It is their anniversary."
"Anniversary of what?" I croaked.
She told me about a bus accident nearly thirty years old, one that had been papered over, retold, repressed. A bus carrying the workers home had vanished in a tunnel. The mill had closed. Names faded into paperwork.
"But she—my Camila—was alive last year," I argued. "I remember marrying her. I remember the kiss by the fireworks. I remember her voice."
She looked at the photograph again. "She was there. People remember differently. The old files say some escaped. Most didn't."
I remember telling her the date, booking a train, and then booking a later plane. I remember blur of stations and posters; sleep crawling like a thing that would not rest. Every hour away from home tasted like a theft.
At the bus terminal that night, the 5845 arrived again. I rode. The driver was a man whose face was a map of plateaus and ruts. His name tag—if I could read it—would have said Egon.
"Driver," I said. "Stop the bus. Where do you go?"
He didn't answer, but he let me take the wheel. I had driven many cars in my life—small, honest things. I had never driven a bus, but in that hour I drove as if practice was an old muscle returning. We punched forward. The tunnel was the same throat, but inside time had been unhooked. Outside one moment was neon and traffic; in the next, a line of wheat like an ocean.
On the bus across from me, in a seat splashed with green upholstery, sat Camila—alive as breath. She sobbed into her palms.
"Camila," I said, and she looked up.
She cried like a child who had been left on a train, then found. "Driscoll, I've been looking for you. I called, I shouted, I prayed. The bus took me and I can't get out."
"You can't get out?" I asked.
"It's like a loop," she said. "We try to leave and the road changes. The tunnel collapses and the bus is the only one to come through. Everyone dies over and over."
"Everyone?"
"Not those who joined. Not those who are from the year," she said. "They stay. They are only pieces tied to a night."
"Then let's get out," I said. "Now. We fight. We do something else."
She clutched my hands as if the bus were a cat and we were a pair of fingers around its throat. "Please," she whispered. "Don't get caught."
"In other words, do something stupid in love," I said, smiling despite my fear.
"Exactly that."
We tried to change the route. The tunnel roared like a mouth. Rocks began to fall. The bus in front of us—our other memory—began to shudder. The sky fractured into two years at once. The faces around us dissolved into age.
"Stop!" Camila said. "Driscoll, stop!"
"I won't let them have you," I said. "If the price is that I rot in 1993 as a ghost at your side every day forever, then it is worth it."
She pressed her forehead to mine. "Don't say things like that," she whispered.
"Do it," a voice behind me said.
I turned. The old man with the cigarette—Floyd Faulkner—looked at me with eyes like wells. "You don't understand. The bus remembers a night. It remembers a collapse. It remembers what paid for it. Once we attach to a year, we stay there."
"How do you break a memory?" I asked.
"Fire," said Bram Castillo, his voice like dry wood. "Sometimes you burn the thing that binds you and it frees the soul."
I looked at the matchbox in my pocket. Once more I struck a flame. I thought to burn the seats, the bus, anything. But Camila gripped my wrist.
"If you burn the bus, you burn us," she said. "We will go up with it."
"Then what do you want?" I asked.
She closed her eyes, thinking of a thousand dinners we had not eaten yet. "We want to be remembered by those who loved us. We want the world to know we existed."
"Then let's make them remember," I said.
We raced through the tunnel as it collapsed, not trying to escape but to bend the moment. I steered into the wall, not to smash but to make contact. The impact was like a pulse. The bus shuddered; the world slid. Photographs in my mind shifted, and the yellowed picture in my pocket flared like a match.
I saw then—not as a ghost but as a presence—two versions of everything. A man at the mill with a camera, children running in a courtyard, faces folding into a frame like paper. A judge? No. Just a supervisor snapping a smile.
When the bus came through, the road outside changed. It was like a page turning. For a moment, the same night belonged to 1993 and to the present.
"Do you remember this?" I asked Camila.
She nodded. "I remember being here with a camera. I remember being scared the night would close."
"You were in the photograph," I said.
She laughed, the sound like warm metal. "I didn't know what a photograph would hold back then."
We drove out of the tunnel and into a road that shifted into a modern street. The other bus came alongside us and then merged—not as an enemy but as a mirror. I looked across and saw myself looking back, a line of years folded in my jaw like old paper.
"Do it now," Bram said.
I killed the engine. "Everyone, listen," I said, because the bus had that strange courtesy where it still listened to loud declarations. "You all were taken that night. The world forgot you. The mill closed. The families moved on. But we can make those who forget remember."
"How?" Jude Lebedev asked. Jude was a wide-shouldered man who had that farmer's stare you can't fake.
"By being in a place where they must see us. We will go to where the photograph came from. We will put this photo back into living hands. We will tell people the names. We will bring witnesses."
The idea felt half-mad and half-true. "Where?" Camila asked.
"Zhanghai Road," I said. "The address on the photograph."
We drove. The bus went where it wanted and where we wanted. The tunnel opened into a street that looked like the set of an old movie. I felt time being gentle and yet cruel. We found the shuttered mill, and in the municipal office a tired woman recognized the photograph at last.
"Angela," she said. "You found the picture."
"Please," I said. "Help us. These people existed. They were on this bus. They died and the world forgot them. Let the town remember them."
Angela Bloom, her name written on a faded notice, held the photograph and cried in a way that put rain into the world. She knew faces in a way other people do: that is how small towns keep memory. She brought out records, reluctant and dusty, and as she did, the bus passengers grew more solid, less like halftones in a newspaper.
"They were there," Angela said aloud in a little meeting of the village elders. "They were there on March twentieth. We had a show. We sent them home on a bus. The tunnel gave way. We buried most of them. We put the rest in boxes labeled 'forgotten.'"
"We are not forgotten," I said, feeling foolishly proud to speak for a passenger and for a million wounded things. "We have names."
Names matter. I read them out loud: "Camila Albert." Her name, carried across two decades like a fragile bird, landed on a table and someone else saw it and said, "That name—my aunt—" and then another voice said, "My god, we never told anyone."
When the town began to record the names again, when Angela took a photo and pinned it to the community board, something moved. The bus, which had been smoking like a clock, quieted like a beast with its head stroked. The passengers, who had been half-air and half-sorrow, looked at each other as if waking from anesthesia.
"Will this free you?" I asked.
Floyd, the cigarette man, tapped the photograph with a shaky nail. "We wanted to be remembered," he said. "We wanted a day so someone would open a drawer and say our names aloud."
"Is that all?" I asked.
"Sometimes," Bram said, "a story is a chain. It needs one person to pick it up."
So Angela put the photograph in the archive. She wrote a small notice. The village scheduled a tiny memorial. People who had left the town came back to stand in damp grass.
The night before the official commemoration, the bus was quieter. Camila snaked her fingers through mine like a promise. "Will you remember me if the world forgets me again?" she asked.
"I don't know how a world forgets someone who still breathes here," I said. "But I will put you in the places where people will find you: in documents, in bad videos, in a list, in the way I call your name in the morning."
"That's not funny," she said, and kissed me because she knew that even the smallest jokes can be armor.
The ceremony was small: the town brought out lanterns and waved them like flags. Angela spoke, and older people muttered names. A child asked, "Why do you all remember people we didn't know?"
"Because someone once loved them enough to come looking," I said.
After the ceremony, the bus stood alone by the depot. The engine warmed like a chest. The driver came to me with eyes that were not angry anymore. "You did what the living couldn't," he said.
"What did I do?" I asked.
"You made them remembered," he said. "The loop that kept them here fed off being ignored. You gave them attention. That splintered the pattern."
"Then I can go home?" I said.
"You can," he said. "But understand, things that live on anniversary nights do not always follow the rules of the living."
We stepped away from the bus. I took Camila's hand and did the most ordinary thing: I paid for a taxi and we walked to my car. The town was a place that smelled like paper and wet metal after the ceremony.
She leaned into me. "Did you see the photo?" she asked.
"I did," I said. "You were there. At the mill. Your name exists there. We have proof."
She laughed. "I don't remember that day. Maybe I lived two lives."
We drove home with the world folding up like a bed at the end of the day.
For a while after that, the voice messages stopped. The phone was quiet because the thing that made them had been named.
Then one night, some months later, I woke to my phone buzzing. The voice was her, soft and ordinary.
"Driscoll," she said. "I'm taking the bus. I'm tired. Will you come?"
I sat bolt upright. "Camila!" I shouted into the room. "Don't you dare."
"I'm not going," she said in the next breath. "I'm walking home. I just wanted you to know."
I drove to the bus stop anyway, and there she stood—wearing the skirt she liked, hands in her pockets, waiting for the taxi I had ordered.
"Why did you call me?" I asked, folding my hands over hers.
"Because," she said softly, "I dreamed I was a photograph. People smiled at me from the corner of a frame, and it made me want to be alive."
"You won't ride 377 tonight," I said.
She laughed that crooked laugh she had when she was pretending to be a schoolgirl. "Guess who learned to drive?"
"You?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "Get used to me driving us to stupid places."
I laughed and kissed her. I held her like a piece of the sky I never wanted to let loose again.
The bus never came again to our stop. Not the old one, not the phantom with its plate number. Once we had put names on paper and made a place where people could point, the pattern cracked. Sometimes places heal not because they stop hurting but because someone tells the story out loud.
The last nights of voices were the hardest. Sometimes at 11 p.m. I heard a whisper on the wind, a sound like pages turning. Once, outside the window, I thought I saw stars gather and rearrange, as if the universe were trying to spell an apology. I stood on the balcony with Camila wrapped around me and listened. She squeezed my hand.
"I used to be in a photograph," she said. "I liked the way everyone looked like they belonged to a single day. But I like being messy now."
"Me too," I said.
We have a picture of ourselves pinned near the kitchen. It is not yellowed. It is not on a scrap of archive paper. It is a photo taken in noon light, with us both squinting, imperfect and entirely present. Under it is a little caption in my handwriting: "March 20—We Remember."
We went to the memorial each year. We brought two cups and set them on the table of those who had no family to bring them gifts. Angela would wait and nod at us the way village elders nod when the world has been repaired a tiny amount.
Sometimes I still wake and think I feel the old engine in the vibration under the bed. Sometimes I open my phone at eleven and hold my breath, waiting for the voice that used to live in the dark. It never comes uninvited now. When it comes, it is her, laughing to say something silly she knows will make me roll my eyes.
"You're impossible," she says. "Come pick me up."
"I always will," I answer, and I mean it as a vow, not a sentence.
We keep Camila's old photograph in a plastic sleeve in a drawer. People come and ask about it. I show them the names again: the ones who loved, the ones who were loved. We teach them to say the names aloud. Saying names is a kind of magic—mundane, but it works.
Once, during a cold wind, a man at a bus depot stopped me and said, "I used to think ghosts were lonely things. Now I know it's memory that keeps them from leaving. Thank you for remembering."
"Don't thank me," I said. "Promise me you'll say the names when you see them."
He did.
The bus never came back with plate 5845. If it is out there, it is unmoored by the pull of a town that remembers. If the bus still rides through tunnels—the world will have to pay the price with names now; the loop will be held accountable by the people who say, 'We were here.'"
I put my hand in the small of Camila's back now and pull her close.
"Don't ride scary buses without me," I whisper.
She answers, "I'll drive."
And when March twentieth comes around, we light a small candle by the little framed photograph, and we read names aloud. The town joins even from a distance. The list of names glows like a map. No one forgets anymore.
My life is a string of small promises now—pick her up, call her at lunch, remind her to lock the door. But the largest promise is this: that names will be said and that the bus that took what it did will no longer go unaccounted. That, in a small way, is the end of a loop.
One time, years later, someone asked me in a coffee shop, "Do you ever regret trying to change it? Wouldn't it be easier to forget?"
I looked at Camila across the table and she smiled like she did the first day we met—awkward, fierce, entirely human.
"No," I said. "I can't forget a voice that saved me. She was the voice in the dark telling me which way to live."
She squeezed my hand under the table and said, "And I'm not going anywhere without you."
We laughed and the bus outside hummed like any other bus—anonymous, ordinary. The world had many strange things in it, but the strange thing we carried inside was small enough to hold. We carried each other, and we said the names aloud.
The End
— Thank you for reading —