The Bus

The bus from county to Shelton intake didn’t have windows. Or rather, it had windows that had been painted over from the inside, except for a strip about four inches wide at the top of each one. You could see sky through the strip. You could not see the road. You could not see where you were going. You could see, for hours, only sky.

I rode in shackles. Wrist to wrist, ankle to ankle, wrist to ankle by a chain that ran through a ring on the bench in front of me. The man next to me slept. He had been on this bus before, transferred between facilities, and he had learned the lesson that you should sleep whenever sleeping was permitted. I had not learned that yet. I watched the strip of sky.

Sky in western Washington in August is a color I had not made friends with yet. Pale, hot, washed out from the bottom edge. We must have been driving south, then west, by the way the sun moved across the strip. I kept track for the first hour. By the second hour I had lost track. By the third I had stopped trying.

When the bus stopped, the doors opened, and a corrections officer I had never seen looked into the van and said: “You’re at Shelton.”

The strip of sky was the same color it had been three hours ago. Everything else was different.