...

There's one bus driver who makes us feel like kings of the road. No, not kings, but important because we are not kings and we are together and we are going fast, up high, beating trains and those puny cars, a danger to us when we're pedestrians, but under this driver we're safe. People will shout "Let him cook!" Old men carrying empty lunch boxes grin when they see him at the wheel. "He hauls ass," they whisper loudly. The night lights blur past, the ones that let us know we've spent our day working for the powerbrokers with the light switches at their fingertips, only now they illuminate our path like vivid fluorescent filaments, alive and wriggling through the dark universe. There's a river out there somewhere, and it too races alongside us. The river knows that in this wet town speed is money, and so normally it dawdles, doubles back, eddies and stalls, just to fuck with the barge captains, but when our driver (yes, while we ride he is ours, we claim him not just as the ferrymaster but as one of us being ferried, he goes where we go) is at the wheel even the river shakes off its November sleep and gallops a salmon commute through riffles and rapids. Downshifting our driver takes the curving bridge at an angle almost parallel to the river, and it's impossible to tell if we are the land-based riders or the reflected shimmering swimmers on an underwater transit route, a time save, skip jump, speed run to the other side.

But eventually, we get off, we relinquish him, we let him go. A few stubborn riders with nowhere else to go might try to stay to the end, but this is frowned upon. Don't make him boot you, don't make him pump the brakes on the illusion. Or maybe we move neighborhoods and start riding a different line where no driver hauls quite so much ass. Then we look out the window and dream of how he made us feel.