50,000 More or Less
by Graves Thayer
Bus careening down State Street, so fast we’ve blueshifted. Emememe is hanging out in the back, trying to smoke discreetly, but the driver has locked the windows down tight so we don’t lose atmospheric pressure and the smoke is just hanging out, clogging people’s eyelids. The skeleton-shaped man beside Evensbee balances his head delicately on his bushy beard.
I’ve forgotten my books at school, a small boy says. Enraged, enlarged, enraptured, the bus driver looks lidlessly back, puffs a great breath, and grinds teeth on asphalt to turn the bus around, alternating the emergency brakes and the emergency gas pedal. It’s a full blown emergency, small boy #1 has forgotten his books. And back at school, the driver balks. He chews at the steering wheel like a dog on raw bone. Can his impatience be contained?
Emememe lies down flat, coasting up and down the aisle on his skateboard. There is a procession of legs lifting and bags being raised whenever he floats by. He’s tired of the ride and wilfully floats through the front windshield, never again to be seen on this page.
Evensbee has lived here for years but can’t find the guts to leave. You must be insane, her brother says, living in a city like that. You must be insane, her lawyer says, submitting her plea deal. I must be insane, Evensbee says, as she laces her shoes in a geometric pattern passed down for generations. It’s a really cool cross-thing when viewed upside-down and it’s cute but definitely heretical.
All this to say, later tonight we laid side-by-side. Whose hand held whose? If I move, everything goes back to normal. We’re out of time, it seems. We’re outside of time, it seems.
Bad news, Bus 42 is late to the stop. There will have been something wrong. It’s tense.
Graves studied fiction and maps at the University of Nebraska. He lives in Las Vegas with his wife, son, and cat, all of whom are incredibly patient with him. He writes fiction when he can and reads when he can’t.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “50,000 More or Less”? This story started over nine years ago and was finished during an overseas deployment. I’d come back to it every few years but it wasn’t until I was far from home that I felt I captured its truest meaning. The prose is heavily influenced by the inundation of details we ingest and the process of trying to communicate with the people important to you. I’m doomed to fail, but hope to fail spectacularly.
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