The face that smiled

The old grey Air force bus climbed up the quarry hill; she liked the quarry hill because she knew the quarry; it was the place where she lay on her belly to catch the little sticklebacks, that made her mother cross, when she took them home; so she recognised the big black slag heaps on the hill and she felt safe.

That day, the little girl with the swinging pigtails, that everybody pulled, wasn't allowed to sit with her brothers and sisters on the bus, instead she was sitting near the front beside a 'big girl'; the most likely reason for this was that she had been climbing on the seats, or shouting & laughing too loudly, or scratching little faces on the frosted windows.

I think that was what she was doing when she suddenly fell forwards; her teeth hit hard against the metal bar of the seat in front and her mouth filled with blood. Everything stopped, she could see her breath on the cold December air and she heard odd and sometimes muffled sounds, creaking & hissing; the bus engine made a loud ticking sound and she heard some kind of crying sound from the back of the bus, and she tried to understand what had happened.

Not many things make sense to a four and a half year old child; she wiped the blood from her mouth and stuck her tongue out in the hope that she could see what had happened, she wiped more blood then took a step towards the front of the bus; she looked at the bus driver, who was sleeping, then stepped up to the frozen window at the front and scraped away some ice to see.

A car, a red car, was pressed right up against the front of the bus; when she thinks back to that moment, she thinks the woman was wearing a red coat and possibly she was, but the odd thing was, the strangest thing was, that the woman was sitting inside her car but.... her head was outside, just lying there; lying in the pretty, sparkling glass.

And her face smiled up at the little girl and Kitty, rubbed against the frosting glass again and smiled back.