Published: 2025-10-22

Sabrina fell asleep in the back of the bus as she usually did. Her brown curly hair covered her face, leaving only her right closed eye visible.

In the front of the bus, an old woman danced the electric boogie. Twenty minutes ago, she sat next to her friend talking about church. “What do you think Sunday’s sermon will be about?” She decided to interrupt the conversation, stand up, and start dancing. Her friend tried to stop her, but to no avail.

The woman, who could barely walk with the support of a cane, was now contorting her body to the rhythm of an imaginary tune.

People looked at her, at first in bewilderment, then with admiration; soon they were all chanting, “Go, grandma, that’s my grandma.”

The bus driver kept telling people to keep it down, but he didn’t want to upset dancing grandma. “My mother used to dance lambada back in the 80s. When a woman gotta dance, she gotta dance.” He said.

Sabrina woke up. She opened and closed their eyes repeatedly, as if trying to squint and focus.

Dancing grandma collapsed, as if the weight of her own body was too much to carry.

People rushed to her aid. “Are you OK grandma?” They kept asking. The woman, however, didn’t seem to understand what happened; her legs hurt, and she couldn’t stand up.

Sabrina laughed as the old woman was helped to her seat. When she boarded the bus, the old lady was already sitting next to the entrance. Sabrina looked at her and said, “Good afternoon, how are you?” The lady was enchanted by the young woman’s politeness, “Good afternoon, I’m very good.” She said with a smile. Sabrina smiled back, not out of politeness, but because at that moment, the two women had made a pact, but only one of them knew it.

Sabrina’s witchcraft was simple: she could live the life of anybody who answered one of her questions. Not merely control them, but live through them. Their memories, feelings, pain, she could experience it all; she became them. The only price she had to pay was her own consciousness; she had to be asleep for the trick to work, and she couldn’t sustain it for long. She mostly used her power to amuse herself, and she was certainly amusing after the dancing session.

As she yawned and stretched her limbs, still laughing at the absurdity of the situation, a young man stood up from his seat, opened his backpack, and got a bomb out of it. People didn’t even notice until he raised it in the air and proclaimed, “We are going to blow into pieces.”

The curious eyes were no longer on the dancing grandma. People started panicking, the bus driver started yelling; meanwhile, the digital clock attached to the bomb kept ticking down.

Sabrina looked at the scene with incredulous eyes, “A guy boards a bus and decides to blow himself and everyone else up for no reason? Stuff like that doesn’t happen in New Town. Although 80-year-old women dancing electric boogie in a bus is the kind of stuff that wouldn’t happen either, and yet…”

People kept trying to calm the young man down, but he threatened to detonate the device. They had reached an impasse.

Sabrina looked at the device in the young man’s hands, it was set to detonate in under ten minutes. She wished she could live his life, but she hadn’t interacted with him before, plus, she had just used her powers, she could probably not do it again until she rested.

She stood up from her seat and walked towards the young man.

“Hey!” She said.

The man looked at her and pointed the device in her direction.

“It’s OK. I mean no harm. What’s your name?”

The man didn’t take the bait.

“I get you. You want to blow the bus, fine by me. All I want to know is your name.” “He’s fuckin’ Bomberman, and I’m Super Mario. Leave it alone, will you? You’re upsetting him.” Said a man who stood next to the rear door.

The man looked at her and said his name, “Elliot.”

“Elliot. Good. Thanks. Now I will go back to my seat.”

“His name? That’s what you want to know in a moment like this? Why won’t you ask him for the Krabby Patty secret formula too?” Said the man near the rear door.

Sabrina ignored his remarks and returned to her seat. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She counted slowly as she tried to fall asleep, but the crying and laments of the frightened passengers made her task difficult. She opened her eyes and looked at the device, it was set to detonate in under five minutes. She took a deep breath and concentrated, she could see her subject, it was near her grasp, and yet, she could not reach him.

She opened her eyes, time was short and her powers were not going to work; she had to find another way. She looked around to see if something, anything, could help her. Nothing seemed to useful. Detonation was less than a minute away.

“If only I could use my powers.”

Something crossed her mind. She looked around again. In the front of the bus, a man lay back in his seat with a newspaper on top of his head; she ran towards him and shook it violently. The man opened his eyes. “So, you finally realized it.”

A loud noise followed by a blinding light made people scream. They threw themselves to the floor, covering the back of their heads with both hands. The noise stopped, the light disappeared. The man holding the device stood in place, bewildered, “When did I get my alarm clock out of the backpack?”

Sabrina was in shock, still unsure what had happened.

“You like playing games,” said the man with the newspaper, “I thought I’d play too. Did you find it amusing?” “Sir, starting today, I am not playing any games ever again.”

THE END.