Homecoming

An Elysa Extract From: Let Helen Like Snow

The security guard sat in the entrance booth, fixed in position, watching buses rattle in and out of Urziceni every few minutes.

His hat was grey and weathered, and his drooped moustache was charred at its edges from decades of cigarette smoke and petrol fumes. On his small desk lay the week’s copy of ____, to which a disposable coffee cup sat atop, symbolising his disdain towards the publication’s abundance of full page advert spreads. These days, most of the locals agreed that the paper lacked substance. Still, most of the old folk still read the thing out of habit and fear of change.

The bus station was horrifically concrete, modernism enforced upon it through the sudden emergence of an American based fast-food joint, recently opened and surprisingly thriving as it sat inside the bus terminal’s interior walls.

The guard assumed his usual position, both feet on the desk with his legs crossed, his hands behind his head to relieve the pressure on his neck muscles. He whistled to tune to an old Romanian nursery rhyme. His job exclusively involved pressing the button to raise the barrier, allowing buses to come and go. He lit a cigarette, and took a rotting bread roll from the rotting inside pocket of his sleeveless black coat, littered with moth holes and patchwork stitches.

It was cold out, relatively deep snow sat on the ground, and partially gritted roads crackled away as they struggled to make a dent in the morning’s ice and frost. The guard watched his breath behave abstractly, forming undulating patterns in between the bites of his stale bread and the puffs of his cigarette. He felt the wetness of his moustache on his upper lip.

It was a busy morning, but nothing atypical for a Monday. The guard stretched out his legs and pushed the big green ‘open barrier’ button with the heel of his boot. All morning he did this; old buses, new buses, single-deckers, double-deckers, cross-continental coaches to Chisinau, Varna, Belgrade, Lviv, all at the mercy of the guard’s heel should they wish to reach their destination.

Five past the day’s eleventh hour. A bus rolled up to the barrier, adoring the text ‘Bucharest Aeroport -> Odessa’ atop its front in pixelated yellow text. Still whistling and reluctant to move, the guard once again kicked the button with his boot. He tried this a few times to no avail, and eventually, perturbed by this inconvenience, he placed down his bread and cigarette, and with a full mouth he leant in to press it with his finger. The barrier still didn’t open.

The impatient coach driver deemed this as the opportune moment to start slamming his horn, as the guard dejectedly looked back, shrugged, and gestured to the apparently faulty button. The driver opened the coach door and shouted down,

“What’s the problem pal? I got places to be.”

The guard avidly put the cigarette back in his mouth, closed his eyes through stubbornness, and took a deliberately deep drag as if to make a point of his nonchalance, and lack of need to be anywhere other than where he sat.

“It ain’t working. What you want me to do about it?”, he resumed his whistling. Sensing that his battle was lost, the driver waved a fist at the guard, before picking up the coach radio and stating,

“Anyone for Urziceni get off now.” He then slammed the radio back into its holder. Two women, unaware up till now of the unfolding situation, frantically found themselves standing up to empty their overhead lockers, and awkwardly stumbled to the front of the bus with an air of embarrassed haste.

The younger of the pair thanked the driver and received something of a grunt in return, before helping her mother down the steps, into the ankle deep slush that filled the gutter that they had been prematurely forced to alight into. The driver, too hurried to help and too warm to move, spoke down to them, “Side door’s open. You get cases out”. The pair trudged their way to the side and heaved their four cases out with some prolonged difficulty. No sooner had they done so, the coach quickly reversed away and sped hurriedly back in the direction of the highway, covering the pair in a grit filled back spray of grey sludge.

Brushing herself down, Mama looked at Elysa, “Well my dear, I guess that means we’re home.”

A despondent and angry Elysa looked around her at the desolate scene she was now faced with. “Look Mama”, she pointed, “a new fast food place has opened”.

Leaving the imprint of four heavy boots and eight flimsy suitcase wheels, the pair trekked onwards, toward the newly touched-down, glowing yellow legs of the recently opened burger joint, which had stomped down and planted its feet in their once sleepy, snow-covered hometown.

The guard sighed, called for maintenance, and continued to flick through the newspaper pages, as he lit another cigarette. When the pair were out of sight, he continued to whistle the old nursery rhyme.