The intro sentence was a little blurry but a great job on the tory line. Did not see that coming. Thought for a second the protagonist was a ghost.

story

The story is brilliant, this situation is too common, but I think there are a few typos…

earbuds blaring from my ipod Earbuds don’t blare :) Music does. That may be intentional though.

I’d left from the hospital should just be ’I’d left the hospital’

I refused to focus the past should be ‘I refused to focus on the past’.

Sorry, it’s late and I’m waiting so the red pen comes out but I still think it’s a pretty awesome story.

nah, i was typing way too fast. :)

@Marli, i know you know what an Interstate is! And busses are notoriously slower than cars, like semis, on the interstate, so of course it would hold up traffic!

Your first sentence seems disjointed; green blurs flying past imply speed, but then you say the bus is holding up traffic, which implies moving at a crawl. I’ve ridden a lot of Greyhound buses in my day, and they never seemed to go any more slowly than most cars. (Actually, in the Twin Cities, metro buses can travel on the shoulders, so my morning commuter bus is always whizzing past traffic on the interstate! Hee.)

This is a nitpick, though, for a very intriguing start. It made me nostalgic for my Greyhound-riding days—not that I’d want to be in the narrator’s situation!

it’s still 60 miles per hour, guys..

oh and, i’ve never been in a fast bus, so that’s news to me!

I think I read it the same way as Elizabeth. Couldn’t get my head around the bus holding up traffic and the blurring imagery. (My imagery is always blurry he,he.) I can see where you are coming from now though with 60 m.p.h. you would get that imagery.

I don’t know a single interstate car driver who goes 60.. they all want to go 70 Mph, and a bus is a hassle, they weave around it like a semi..

I am an Interstate car driver who goes 60. That’s the speed limit in just most, but not all, Northern Ohio counties. It’s 65 around me, for some reason.

I just realized what felt really disjointed about the first sentence to me: if the narrator is looking sideways out the window to see the trees flashing past, it’s weird that they’re somehow also noticing the traffic backing up behind them.

Obviously this is all nitpicking on a small part of a good piece; it was just a little prose-analysis epiphany I couldn’t help but share.

no prob, that’s very true.. didn’t think about that.. thanks!

it was just an all-encompassing setting sentence. perhaps he looked around, perhaps we zoom in from there.