"The Bus Children" by Becky Gould Gibson (Reprise)
This reprise of a story from “Twists and Turns” is not exactly a spirited Christmas story, but it is holiday-”adjacent” (to borrow a wonderful phrase from Nick Sipe in his story in “Foolhardy”). It is a story about good intentions and learning about the lives of others, which is the essence of empathy, we suppose, something we can all use more of and offer more often when we can. —Happy Holidays from “6-minute Stories” podcast and the Personal Story Publishing Project.
– She looked like an angel.
We’d meant to make the children happy.
Becky Gould Gibson has published eight collections of poetry, notably, Aphrodite’s Daughter (Texas Review Press, 2007); Need-Fire (Bright Hill Press, 2007); Heading Home (Main Street Rag, 2014); The Xanthippe Fragments (Saint Andrews Review Press, 2016); and Indelible (The Broadkill River Press, 2018). Her current focus is creative nonfiction. Two short pieces have appeared in print, one in Canary, another in Snowy Egret. Becky Gibson taught English at Guilford College until her retirement in 2008. She lives in Wilmington, NC.
Author’s Talk
Becky Gould Gibson
“The Bus Children” has been in my head for a long time. Funny thing is, you go on with your life and just push stories down. But one that matters won’t go away. I never told anyone what happened. Not my parents, not anybody. Had I not been such a secretive child, keeping my thoughts and feelings to myself, I doubt I would have had anything to write about. When a memory is pressed down, irrelevancies are pressed out. Facts fall away but the core remains. What was it like?
Years ago, when I tried to write a poem about the incident, I couldn’t make it work. I needed the scope, space, pace of prose as well as a relaxed, unbuttoned manner. Prose liberated the child’s voice, the child’s perspective. Of course, I had to invent details to support action leading up to the turning point. I added the collards, the woman’s belly, the boy on the aisle holding his nose. When I write a piece like this, memory is so bound up with imagination the two have become inseparable.
Or almost. I do know what actually happened that afternoon. I did not make up the sequence of events or the main insight. Innocence gone wrong. The shame of presumption. And of course, the abiding question of my childhood: would I ever figure out how to be a grown-up?
