The Last Bus Home

A man receives a bus ticket in the mail from his dead mother. The ticket says Route Zero: Home. Everything in his life from his mother's death up to this point has been as dull as cinder blocks and just as dirty. Should he take the Zero bus? What waits for him at the end of the line?The calls only come when I’m at work. They start as vibrations in telephone wires, igniting under bird feet perched high above the freeway, metal boxes sending electric spider webs into the ground, crackling beneath dead bodies rotting six feet under corn fields, faster and faster into the dark abyss of sewer pipe acid trips and up into my fifth floor apartment, jangling in the handset of my telephone, waking the crack heads next door. I imagine the phone ringing once, twice, a million times before my answering machine picks it up with a click, recording silence for five long seconds before clicking to a stop and rewinding in the dark of my living room. Lights come on in the apartments around mine, but I’m not home. I’m never home anymore. I haven’t been home in years.