The following is no masterpiece, but I’ve decided to give in to the writing bug I caught from a friend of mine and make a habit of doing writing exercises. So I figure, why not share them too, while I’m at it? I’m a bit rusty; don’t judge too harshly. 
Prompt #221: Put a used car salesman, a banker, and a movie addict in a bus. Add a flat tire and an empty window seat. One starts laughing hysterically. Write the scene.
The Greyhound trundled down the highway, coughing out a cloud of dust and exhaust that could be seen for miles across the flat landscape. No one traveled this route, which was why no one was on it – except the bus with its three passengers.
One of those passengers, a slim thirty-something woman in a cheap business suit, stared out the window, bored nearly to tears by the unchanging, unending view.
“I don’t know why I let you talk me into this, Bob,” she began for what must have been the hundredth time since the couple got on the bus. She spoke in a high-pitched, overloud voice, so fast that the words seemed to tumble over themselves. “We were doing just fine before, but you just had to go and–”
“Sheryl,” the man cut in loudly, with the air of someone used to rehashing the same argument many times over. Bob’s voice, too, seemed comfortable at high volume, and held just a hint of Southern twang. “Sheryl, we were not doing just fine before, as you were happy to remind me of–” here Sheryl gasped indignantly and made as if to begin talking again, but the man overrode her by raising his voice even louder– “As you were happy to remind me of at least once a week! I’ve told you and I’ve told you, and I don’t want to hear another word about it!”
“You don’t want to hear another word about it?” Sheryl shrieked, laboring the first word with heavy sarcasm. “What about what I want? I didn’t want to leave our apartment! I didn’t want to take the bus! I wanted the window seat! I–”
“Hey, what about what I want?” called the only other passenger in the bus from a row near the back. “Like some peace and quiet!”
“Oh shut up, Baldy!” Sheryl snapped back at him venomously. Crossing her arms petulantly, she settled back into her sulky study of the desert landscape. The man sitting beside her, aisle-side, gave the balding man a grateful, you-know-how-it-is look over his shoulder, which the man did his best to ignore.
As the balding man, a banker as it so happens, was ostentatiously flipping his paper to a new page – though he had finished the entire thing hours ago – the bus lurched and swerved dramatically. Sheryl stood up, shrieked like a dying bat, and careened theatrically back into her seat, losing a shiny red stiletto off her foot in the process.
“Oh my shoe!” she yelled, as the bus came to a slow halt along the side of the road, but was cut off from further lament by the calm voice of the bus driver.
“Sorry for the inconvenience, folks,” the ancient little man rasped. “We’ve got a flat. I’ll just call roadside and we’ll be on our way again in a jiffy.”
“A flat?” Sheryl cried miserably. “Oh just when this day couldn’t get any better!” Shooting a look at Bob sharp enough to pop the rest of the tires, she began fishing for the lost shoe under the seat in front of her.
Deciding to take this opportunity to escape the confines of the bus and the theatrics of its passengers, the banker made his way forward. His hopes fell when Bob rose behind him.
“Good time for a smoke, I s’pose,” he said loudly. Ignoring another glare from Sheryl, he followed Bob out into the scalding sun.
“Hooey! I guess they don’t call it the desert for nothing!” he said obviously.
“No,” replied the banker blandly, trying unsuccessfully to move away from the other man. “They really don’t.”
“So what do you do?” Bob asked around his cigarette, flicking his lighter to life.
The banker sighed. “I’m a banker for Prime Trust. We’re opening a branch in Reno and–”
“A banker, eh?” Bob cut in, taking a short drag before continuing, unwittingly breathing smoke into the banker’s face as he spoke. “Now there’s a useful profession! Wish I’d known a good banker back home! Bet we wouldn’t have had to leave! You know most banks are criminal, I mean real scumbags, no understanding of life out in the real world.” He gestured expansively with his cigarette. “You know how hard it is to pay rent when you have a woman spending all your money? No, I guess you wouldn’t,” he added, correctly deducing that the banker hadn’t had a date in years.
“I heard that!” Sheryl shrieked indignantly from just beyond the bus doorway. She practically hopped out of the bus, struggling to get her shoe on while walking, before giving up and waving it at him instead. “If you actually sold something in your life– ouch, god!” she stood on one foot to avoid the scalding pavement. “If you weren’t such a lousy salesman and actually sold something once in your life–”
The banker, on the verge of pulling out the remaining fringe that clung morosely to his scalp, walked the length of the bus and tried to tune out their bickering. A cloud crossed the sun and the scalding heat abated slightly.
Then the world exploded.
That’s how it seemed to him, at any rate. One minute, he was contemplating the likelihood of the next rest stop selling earplugs, and the next, he was on his face, ears ringing, spitting blood and trying to suck air into lungs as tight as Sheryl’s well-toned butt. He raised his head, turning blurred vision to either side, and found his fellow passengers equally well off.
Bob was also on his face, Sheryl flat atop him, still holding her cheap red shoe. Her blonde hair was in massive disarray, her short skirt flipped up entirely as if to prove that her butt was in fact tight, and her face one of utter shock. Bob began to cough and sputter beneath her, and she looked down at him dumbly.
“Get…” he broke off into weak coughing, “get off me, woman!”
She blinked uncomprehendingly, and the banker stumbled to his feet, intending to help her up. His vision swam, and he stood rooted to the spot, staring around him. The bus was a fiery inferno, its twisted wreckage spewing black smoke as it blazed. So much for the bus driver. The smoke was not thick, but it worsened his already cloudy vision. The flames were what held his attention, climbing into the sky as they consumed what was left of the bus. What on earth had happened?
Bob groaned and cursed, and the banker came back to himself. He had to get away from this mess, out of the smoke, out of range in case something was left of the bus to explode. He shakily made his way over to his two companions, hauled Sheryl to her feet, and reached out a hand to Bob, who began coughing again and rolled over onto his back, exposing a bloodstained, tattered mess in place of his shirt. The place he had landed was riddled with rocks and had not been kind to unprotected skin.
“Oh my god, are you all right?” the banker yelled over the ringing in his ears, and began coughing as well. “We have to get clear of this thing!” he added, not waiting for an answer. “Come on!”
Still coughing painfully, Bob grasped the offered hand and struggled to his feet. He stood with hands on knees for a moment, then squinted around, going still when his eyes focussed on the bus wreckage.
“What the hell happened?” he asked. “Good lord man, we have to get away from that thing! Sheryl!” He grabbed her arm. “Sheryl snap out of it, we’ve got to move!” And he began to drag her down the road. After a few steps he stopped and looked back. “Well? You coming, Banker?”
The banker was rooted to the spot, his eyes wide, mouth slack. His vision had finally cleared, and he was staring at the horizon – all the horizons. Large columns of smoke rose from four distinct places, black specks danced in the sky in complex arial formations, and three huge mushroom clouds bloomed in the far distance. He realized belatedly that not all the noise in his ears was left-over from the explosion. Bob, following his gaze past their immediate inferno, stumbled to a halt.
Suddenly, Sheryl shrieked, sending spikes of terror up the spines of both men as they looked for strafing jets, falling bombs, or some other horror to match what they were already seeing.
“My other shoe! Now I’ve lost my other shoe!” she cried, looking at her feet. “How am I supposed to walk through the desert with only one shoe!”
The two men’s eyes met in disbelief for a moment.
“Your shoe?” Bob asked incredulously. “Your shoe? Look around you, woman! Those are bombs going off over there! Cities are on fire! And you’re worried about your shoe?!”
As Bob continued to berate his girlfriend for her myopic outlook, all the banker could think of was that, out of five billion people on the planet, he had to be with these two when the apocalypse finally came. Before he knew what he was doing, he began to laugh hysterically. The end of the world was really going to suck.
Bottom Line: Disney’s new Alice in Wonderland was a decent movie, but nothing to write home about. It didn’t feel like Wonderland, despite excellent character realization and beautiful visuals.
