There is no difference between a flower and a weed | Amie Souza Reilly

The school bus was abandoned at the end of the cul-de-sac; its engine seized. Walt shook an arthritic finger at it from his kitchen window. An eyesore, a nuisance. Three weeks later, Ms. Lee, who used to be a kindergarten teacher, pushed a full wheelbarrow up to the front of the bus and kicked open the door. She covered the dashboard in soil, stuck her wrinkled white fingers into the mound and planted succulents in each hole. Ms. Lee went on a date once with Joe Johnson, before his hair went gray. He drank too much and hit a stonewall while driving her home. It wasn’t her stonewall, but still, she was upset, and never returned his calls. He walked by the bus on a cloudy day and wrote in the grime on the back window, a sonnet of Xs and Os. Racoons began nesting in the coils of the engine parts and chattered endlessly into the night. Spring turned to summer and the plants proliferated, their roots poking into the odometer, wrapping around the steering wheel, creeping into the grooves of the gas and brake pedals until, like brides, they found their way down the aisle. Walt had had a fight with his son the last time he came to visit. He didn’t like his son’s new boyfriend or the way he wore his hair and so he yelled at him for leaving the backdoor open. The racoons will come in, he yelled, and his son left in a huff, tired of never doing anything right. Eighteen Sundays passed. Every morning, Walt checked the phoneline to be sure the racoons hadn’t chewed through the wires. Joe started carrying a spray bottle on his walks and spritzing Ms. Lee’ spreading succulents, which had by then begun to sprout up and over the front windows. Are the bus seats soft? Walt asked Ms. Lee as she passed by carrying a yellow bag of fertilizer. Soft as the skin on the tip of your thumb, she told him. The night of the nineteenth silent Sunday, Walt slid a knife from the block on his counter into his back pocket and headed for the bus. He shooed away the racoons, pried open the emergency exit door at the back. An apple core fell out of the tailpipe. Walt heaved himself up through gaping doorway and inhaled the smell of dirt, dried gum, and old motor oil. Moonlight poked in the windows, kissing the tips of the glossy leaves and Walt curled into a seat at the rear of the bus, rested his head on the bag of fertilizer Ms. Lee had left behind. He took the knife from his pocket, pushed the flat of it against the skin of his thumb before scraping a piece of gum from under the seat. He buried the gum next to the tiniest plant, and then, with just the tip of the blade, he carved I MISS YOU into the seat leather before drifting off to sleep. 

Amie Souza Reilly lives in Connecticut. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Chestnut Review, trampset, and SmokeLong Quarterly. Tweets @Smidgeon227.