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“It’s magic sand again,” Natasha sighed upon opening the envelope with the week’s wages. “I’m complaining to the union, this is getting ridiculous.”
“It’s no use,” Elena retorted, her pile of ‘magic sand’ sitting on a makeshift coffee table next to the used and abused driver’s wheel. “Run straight to the border, maybe you’ll get past the guards while they’re busy counting their own grains of sand.”
“My cousin on my mother’s side works in border patrol,” Sam interjected, not even bothering to open her envelope. “He says they’re paid with jewelry.”
Natasha scoffed, “Cut the crap. No they’re not.”
“They are.” A smile creeped upon Sam’s features. “It’s the cheap plastic kind.”
“Well girls, enough of the banter.” Sophia, who’s turn it was for the next three to four hours, got into the driver’s seat and buckled the belt. “Shift starts in the next three minutes.”
“Does the shift ever end?” Elena asked forlornly, looking out the window into the endless woods which blocked the road on both sides. Then, beyond the woods, were hills, then countless acres of farmland, but one thing stayed the same throughout every landscape, every type of terrain, every minute of every day:
The bus lanes.
Seventeen-year-old Sam was still on probation after that one time she nearly drove the bus into a lake. Natasha and Elena came here from some Slavic country or other looking for a job and were bound to succeed: in a place where an average bus route is longer than average life expectancy, any person with a valid driving license was badly needed. Sophia tried to cross the border to the south, was caught by the guards and conscripted to the Bus Service, which was not only worse than any sentence, it was considered a fate worse then death.
So far, the girls have managed to get along fine.
Sam always wore a grey hoodie and kept her black hair short, – to get out of fights easier, she claimed. Elena was a strawberry blond with blue eyes, feeling at home in her soft pink tracking suit and stained rucksack. Natasha was pale, almost anemic, always cold, her hands trembling on the wheel like it was a DJ stand. Sophia had brown skin and luxurious black hair; life full of petty crimes didn’t (and probably couldn’t) strip her of soft, glimmering beauty shining from her picturesque features.
“I’m nervous,” Elena whispered, watching the brown leaves flying by the driver’s window. “What if we don’t get out of here before winter?”
Natasha laughed hoarsely.
“You think we’re ever getting out of here? Please.”
“It’s still better than to run a train,” Sophia added, staring into the infinite distance before her. “People die there, you know.”
“I don’t care about us three,” Elena continued, not looking at either of the women, “but Sam is just a kid.”
“I heard her saying she can fit up to three bodies in a dumpster,” Sophia added nonchalantly.
“You know it’s bravado!” Elena shrugged angrily, fiddling with a little green bow on her uniform. “She’s still so young. She hasn’t even loved anybody, she never had a relationship, and if she never gets out of there-“
It started to rain.
“I still think you’re exaggerating,” Sophia remarked calmly, turning the windscreen wipers on. “I have a little sister, she was in kindergarten when I got drafted, and I still get messages from her. It’s not much, but you can live with that as well.”
“How many siblings have you got?” Natasha asked.
“We were a family of ten.” Sophia paused. “One of us got drafted when he broke into a bank. I mean, I suppose he did it to get off the streets. At least the driver’s cabin is warm, you know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. Jorge was his name. Older than me by three years, loved him to death.” Sophia honked at a truck which took too long to make a U-turn. “Taught me how to ride a pony, when we still had one.”
They passed a sign which read “EACH AND EVERY DRIVING ADULT WELCOME AT THE RECRUITMENT AGENCY”.
“I lost my mom thirteen years ago,” Natasha spoke up just when they were crossing a bridge. “There was nothing to eat. Pigs were sold through a ‘sale wheel’, where everybody paid their part and the winner was determined by chance. My mom almost got home with the pig she won when she was killed on our porch. I had to kill our cat to feed me and my brother. Before you ask, yes, someone stole our mother’s corpse along with the pig.”
“Shit,” Sophia muttered, “we didn’t have it that bad after all. How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Shit.” Another honk. “Sorry, but you don’t look like you’re twenty-eight.”
“I know. Had to do a lot of things to stay alive. Slaughter cattle, clean shoes, pour chemicals into buckets.”
“Tough shit. By the way, where’s Elena?”
They crossed another bridge.
“No idea. Want me to go look for her?”
Sophia looked over the sensors.
“I don’t think there is a need for it,” she said softly, putting her foot on the brakes. “Is Sam at the back?”
“She should be. The girl sleeps like a log.”
“Let it stay that way.”
The indicator for one of the fire escape windows marked it as broken.