The bus was once a cafe, and is again. It now sits on the corner of a suburban city block with only a thin strip of the property it once commanded surrounding its edges. The windshield has been replaced, along with many other panes of glass along the lower floor. The wipers have been plucked from their sockets, the door hinges oiled and the door itself repainted. The graffiti is gone.
The first level holds a kitchen with a miniature fridge full of almond milk. There is a new addition where the inoperative engine once sat at the back, a storage hold for extra ingredients though the menu offers only eight drinks. There is a small pastry case of cookies and scones that is replenished each morning, and a wicker basket on the counter next to it for the unsold, day-old, discounted leftovers. An electric clock ticks unnecessarily on the wall, and the lights turn on and off with a switch.
Up the spiraling staircase, the loft remains relatively unchanged. At the front and back are bench seats with new velvety coverings but the same aura of imaginative freedom as when they were warped orange vinyl. In between, six tiny tables stick tightly to the walls, faced on two sides each by the faded buckets of ancient bus seats. The tables have recently received a coat of resin so that the former contents exist without the old bumps and edges--mosaics of broken glass, jewel-toned beads and handmade artworks, sometimes painted directly onto the table's original surface, are preserved unavailable to curious fingers.
There are people inside. A single employee makes teas and lattes downstairs, darting between the kitchen and the closet in no more than two steps when something is used up. Three people are in line, though only one will stay to drink his coffee by an upstairs window. Four already sit in the loft, as well--a young couple with their young daughter and a young woman reading a memoir on one of the bench seats, coffee in hand and boots abandoned fully laced on the floor. She has been here for a while.
There are people outside as well. The man who lives next door thought the cafe would bring too many people to his quiet corner of town, and though he is actually pleased to hear more thoughtful conversation and laughter on the street, he tends to the shrubbery between his home and the bus with a scowl and a bitter quip on his lips. He is in the garden during most of the cafe's business hours. A solitary stone picnic table sits alongside the bus on a platform of moss-blanketed paving stones, and this table is occupied by four college students bent over textbooks and laptop screens. Across the street is a boy of twelve riding past on a bike and a woman of twenty-eight perched on the curb at the cusp of the crosswalk. She has been here for a while.
She once lived inside the bus, you see.
It was not her house, as the law would have it, but her home. It was where she carved lines of prose into the wood paneling of the walls and stored heaps of journals filled with stories she wrote around the puckers and grooves of the tables she covered in things she found beautiful. It was her bare toes that cracked the plastic of the window seats when she stood on them to pry decorative panels off of the ceiling to create hiding holes for her treasures. It was where she collected books of all kinds but mostly those about India and exotic birds and how to play the guitar. It was her blood on the railing of the staircase from once pinching the skin of her palm in the folding door.
It was where she hid from the reality that was not formed in her imagination.
The bus was never fully operational. It was a copy of a London double-decker, an imitation of a classic that was commissioned by a theme park designer who closed his gates the same day he opened them. The bus was sold to a man who was interested in making it a home but who eventually scrapped the idea and sold it to a wealthier man whose vision was of an antique, dreamlike cafe that sat no more than twelve people and served cocktails in the evenings. For a while the shop was a success, and when it drifted into memory not many souls missed its company.
Immobile and monstrous, it was towed to a piece of land on the edge of a forest, where it sat, untouched but with many things fancied for it, for the four years before and nearly ten years after the girl discovered its sanctuary. The man who owned the grass beneath its wheels made a habit of leaving treats for the child once he became aware of her fleeting presence, though they never met--a book of poetry or a bar of chocolate sealed in a Tupperware container to discourage the local wildlife.
She spent less and less time in the bus as she grew, for a while only entering as a first stop when running away. Most of her stories were left to the mice when she moved to college, along with her books and paints and the driver's side nook full of dried leaves and flowers she had amassed over the years, each one invisibly tethered to a memory. She left wild herbs pinned to the fabric of the upstairs curtains, drawings of fingerprint patterns on the seats, a mural of nothing in particular across the expanse of counter top where fancy drinks once slid from hand to hand.
When the man first went inside, he was overwhelmed by the air of contentment. That was when the girl was thirteen, just on the fringe of outgrowing her personal hideaway. When the ever-spreading neighborhood began to talk of her escape to school--whether from an individual or her entire family, he couldn't quite grasp--he returned to find the interior decoration of the bus nearly unchanged but the atmosphere oppressively stagnant and sad. He spent a while looking for some memento to send her, a reminder of the wildness of her childhood, but abandoned the idea so as not to reveal his knowledge of her place. He sat for a long time in the window seat at the back of the loft, turning the pages of her stories with a sentimental gaze.
The woman with the coffee sits in the same place now, in the same bus that has been relocated and restored for what will not be the last time. The spine of her book is cracked in four places, marking the progress of her first reading. It is a story of the feat of existence through imagined truths and fantastical characters with the power to defeat demons steeped in reality. It is beautiful, and somber, and hopeful. There is no mention in the story of an abandoned replica double-decker bus brimming with both mystery and safety, but she can picture the connection between the author whose name she now recognizes and the place in which she sits.
She was invited here two nights ago after an encounter at her favorite bar with a woman whose thin, paint-flecked hands drew her attention before she had time to notice the accompanying curls and distantly passionate eyes. Her clever smile encouraged conversation, and she found herself agreeing to coffee at a cafe she had never heard of in a part of town she truly knew nothing about. The appointment was stamped into her mental calendar with a brief but tantalizing kiss on the lips as the other woman made her way to the door, avoiding eye contact but smiling to herself.
The reader's book of choice is a coincidence of impulse shopping and possibly fate, an unintentional abundance of information about her coffee date consumed in part just before the author herself arrives. The woman who was staring from the opposite street corner is now climbing the stairs, a paper cup of tea trembling in one hand while the other compulsively twists the lid of the chapstick in her bag. She is less confident in this daylight, this place, with these people who are so unaware of their part in the history of the metal sculpture they sit within. She reaches the loft and gathers a lungful of its unfamiliar air, trying to imagine the space as she left it but unwilling to accept that the woman in the far window is not part of her reality as she tucks a closed book into a bag on the floor and slides her feet into worn brown boots. With four more bold steps forward, the tea-drinker stalls in front of the reader, who looks up and then stands, expression indecipherable but pleasant, and then smiles.
"Eleanor."
