There was a reason that this bus stop, no longer in use, had not been removed—a strange legend that was passed down in this little town. Structures that fell into disuse were always left alone for a while, undemolished. Why? Because abandoned places might still be in use by our ancestors—they might still be needed by those who came down from the afterlife. Here and there in this town, old houses stood eerily empty.
The origins of the legend and the reason it persisted until the present day were irrelevant. But it was thanks to this ridiculous fairy tale that, day after day, I had a solitary place to relax.
In that relaxation, however, I grew careless. At some point, I had fallen asleep within the shelter. This wasn’t the first time I dozed off, but I wondered if it was due to the temperature getting warmer or if it was simply because I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before.
At any rate, upon waking, I was shocked at myself for falling asleep, and even more shocked when I took out my phone and checked the time. I was now officially sixteen years old.
I had a number of missed calls and texts from my mother, who must have gotten home from the wake. The texts were part concern, part lecture. Only half lying, I replied that I had taken a break on a bench in the park and fallen asleep, and that I would be home soon.
The dark and quiet of the shelter, darker and quieter still now that it was late at night, gave me a strange, hazy sensation, as though I were still asleep.
I felt my breath getting a bit out of sync with my body and steadied it. I’d said I would be heading right home, but I still needed a bit of time to prepare myself to step from my dream world back into the outside. I had to align my rhythm with that of beyond the shelter walls. I breathed slowly, and after a while, I could feel my body acclimating itself to the real world.
I stood up and took a few steps to shake off the motes of darkness clinging to my body, then reached for the handle of the sliding door.
“Where is it you always go?”
There was a voice.
My hand flew from the handle, the door rattling in its wake. I had breathed in too suddenly. Pain coursed through my lungs. My heart was beating as loud as a drum.
In a momentary panic, I wobbled back in the darkness, placing my hands against the wall. It felt coarse to the touch, and something—maybe dust or fragments of the wall itself—fluttered to the ground.
Calm down, I silently told myself. I breathed out and back in again.
What was that?
I’d heard a voice. A voice that came from my right—perhaps a female voice.
It had to be my imagination, didn’t it? I probably was still half dreaming.
“Today, I’ve learned that you sleep too.”
Just as I was thinking this, I heard the voice again, more clearly. A husky female voice. I felt electricity run down my spine.
Where was it coming from?
The first thing that came to mind was a ghost, no thanks to the legends I had heard so often they were practically drilled into my brain. I couldn’t imagine a better setting for such an encounter than an ancient bus stop late at night. Still, I had my doubts. Why would a spirit appear right now, all of a sudden, when they had never done so before? Plus, how could a person as normal as me ever hear the voice of a ghost?
The next thing to occur to me was that perhaps someone had snuck in here while I was asleep. But why?
I put my all into steadying my breath and heart rate. I wondered if I should turn around. I stood at a crossroads. If I turned around now, would some danger befall me? I was scared and nervous, but I came to a decision quickly.
Was I stupid? Was I really that big of an idiot? This was nothing to worry about. There was only one correct choice here.
I realized that this was what I thought about every day. I’d been waiting for this. I came to this dilapidated bus stop every single night, nauseated at my own vapid self, because I was waiting for a moment like this one to arrive.
And finally, the moment had come, without fanfare.
That was all.
At the very least, I needed to verify what was happening. I didn’t know how I’d be able to live with myself if I let the moment pass without doing at least that much. I took another deep breath in and then breathed out for just as long.
A plethora of dreadful premonitions ran through my head. Truth be told, I was frozen in place. Slowly, gradually enough that this person or thing would not notice, I turned around.
There, in the dark…was not a humanlike form. Nor an animal-like form. Yet, something was there, though I didn’t know what exactly it was.
I squinted.
In the darkness floated a small form, or perhaps forms, glowing with faint green light.
There were no light sources within this shelter, which meant that whatever was floating here shone with their own light.
There were two a few dozen centimeters above the bench. Just above the seat of the bench were ten more. And near the ground there were nine—or rather ten again—as two of them merely looked to be overlapping. The two up top were different in form from the other twenty. They moved differently as well. The top two were almost elliptical in shape—a bit like almonds, one beside the other. Now and then they disappeared at the same time. The others were rather small and round. They wriggled about almost systematically, like insects.
Were these what had spoken to me?
I stood there watching, but the little lights did not appear to mean me any harm. I gathered up my courage and drew nearer.
“What’s the matter?”
I felt goosebumps rise on my skin as the same voice sounded again. My feet stopped in place. The voice was coming from right in front of me. It was clearly responding directly to my actions. These were words with meaning. Were these things capable of conversation?
I swallowed hard and decided to try speaking back myself.
My words faltered.
“Who’s…speaking?”
There was a reaction to the sound of my voice. I heard something like a person inhaling. Then, the twenty small orbs began to wriggle, the upper ten shifting upwards into a line. The two lights at the top grew larger than before, changing from ellipses into almost perfect circles.
“How?”
The female voice sounded surprised. The two top lights blinked off and on in repetition, like a traffic light changing. I stood there in silence, unable to reply as I did not understand the question. Again, I heard the sound of someone inhaling.
“You…can hear me…?”
“…I can.”
The two top lights grew even larger. Half of the twenty smaller lights, the ten up top, moved up closer to the top two in a line.
“Why now?”
Again and again the top lights flickered. Blink, blink. Blink, blink.
“Are you…alive?” the voice asked.
“I-I am, are you?”
“I’m still alive.”
The conversation was progressing. I supposed it was asking if I was alive because it thought I might be a ghost. On my end, I had no idea whether this thing made only of light that was speaking to me was an organism or not, but apparently it was also alive. I figured I should at least ask what sort of life-form it was.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Where?”
Right here, the voice seemed to say. But where?
“Are you…a bug or something?”
“A bug? I’m a person.”
No matter how you diced it, that did not look like a person. The lights stretched and wriggled.
“You don’t…look like a person,” I said honestly. The voice grew quiet. I wondered if I had made it unhappy, but it seemed to be thinking.
“You do look like a person to me though,” it said.
“Well, that’s because I am one.”
“How do I look to you?”
I explained it exactly as I saw it: two elliptical lights, about the height of my chest, with ten small, connected lights just above the seat of the bench, and ten similarly sized lights near the ground.
“I see.”
I could not have imagined what sort of reaction I would get to this, but there was a sense of acceptance to the voice. Then, the two top lights drifted simultaneously up and down.
“What you’re seeing are my eyes and nails.”
“Eyes and…your nails?”
I reflexively gasped at the absurd reply. Once more I stared. Now that I took a closer look, I could almost see variations within the light of the top two shapes, like sclera and pupils. Was the momentary vanishing blinking? Growing larger as the eyes grew wider? Was the vertical motion nodding?
The two groups of ten lights were hands and feet?