Love Letters on a Bus

The bus stop was one of five in the village. It stood nestled amid ancient trees that had given up on blooming. Behind the dead trees and the lone bus stop was a house that the dark recesses of Stephen King's mind would have thought up on a dark night. Layer upon layer of dead leaves which must have collected when the trees had life carpeted the house's driveway which was cut off from the road by a rusting double gate which was once black.
The house had no window panes left, and cats could be seen coming and going as if they owned the place. Thick weeds had engulfed the door handle but somehow not grown up through the wood of the door, and so were left half hanging in the form of an obscure sculpture. The tiles from the almost flat roof were chipped and discolored. When it was particularly windy, small segments of tile could be heard clattering down onto the driveway. Empty beer cans and discarded food cartons littered the dead leaf motif and there was a constant aroma of wet moss.
When the sun sat low but bright in the sky, tendrils of dark pink light would snake through the broken windows and cast shadows on the outside road. Tortured, neglected wood surrounding the supporting beams would groan as the heat hit and sigh as night fell.
Misery and neglect poured out of the house, and it was difficult to know whether it had ever been the object of anyone's love. Logic would dictate that someone had built it for a purpose; it was detached and considering the lonesome location, it felt like it had been chosen by a person, rather than being built to fill a quota.
Carrie wondered what had happened to cause the love for this house to extinguish. Death perhaps. A bad experience that caused the owners such pain they couldn't face the house any longer. Whatever had happened, Carrie felt sadness when she stood outside this house, waiting for the bus to take her up to the train station.
The whole village teetered precariously on a steep hill. The train station was relatively close to Carrie's house in terms of distance, but it was up steep hills, and when carrying heavy books on a hot day, this walk was long and uncomfortable. The classrooms where she taught were stuffy at the best of times, and turning up to teach following a pretty well vertical walk, was not optimal. This also applied to cold days, warm days, mild days, good days and bad days. Uphill was not part of Carrie's vocabulary. This was why she braved the buses. There was no real schedule for when they passed her house. She generally opted to go out an hour before she was scheduled to do so, would listen for the bus going pass at the top of the road and then plan to get the next one. Technically they were meant to be every half hour, but the bus drivers had no actual schedule to stick to. Whilst they were dedicated to ferrying the village stragglers to their destinations, they also had a penchant for elaborate breaks at obscure times. So, on occasion, Carrie would time her trip to the bus stop logically, but could not predict or factor in a drivers break. It resulted in occasional waits at the stop that lasted for more than an hour. She lived very close to the stop, but once she had left the house, she knew that abandoning her wait at the bus stop would result in the bus sailing past as she took two steps away from it.
It was because of this uncertainty, and because of the sometimes very long wait, that Carrie had time to study the abandoned house, and imagine what it had once been. Her daydreams about its back story varied in tone, depending on her mood which was up and down like a yo-yo. Good days would result in long thoughts about the owners and what adventures, however small, they shared under the now broken roof. Bad days resulted in long thoughts about the owners and what tragedies, however small, they shared under the always broken, cracked, decrepit roof that had shattered the day the owners' love died.
Today was a day of dark thoughts. Carrie was contemplating the idea of scaling the broken gates, trudging through the leaves and bottles and pushing open the cracked and forgotten door. She imagined finding a woman sitting in a rocking chair, covered in dust, knitting. The old lady would have been there for a long time, never moving, perhaps inhuman, but still in human form. She would see Carrie and open her mouth, letting out a stream of black which would engulf Carrie and she would be forever consumed by the anguish which had destroyed the old lady and doomed her to remain in the rocking chair for the rest of her unnatural life.
A shiver ran down Carrie's back as her imagination started to fill in the details of the dark room in the broken house. She was just beginning to fill in the cracks in the walls with moss, when she was startled back to reality by the sound of the bus rumbling up the hill. It was only thirty five minutes out from its usual schedule, and Carrie could see the heat shimmers from its roof before it circled round the corner and came into view. The buses were dark green and had no logo. On hot days the exterior got so hot that touching the door to climb on would leave you with blisters on your fingers and swear words in your mouth.