The Stop by Mr. Nihil

A flaming bus speeds through the night. Inside it are two men. One is Jack Friendly, a man in his late 50′s with an Ernest Borgnine somatotype, blonde hair, and one eyebrow, black. His other eyebrow had vanished, mysteriously, a few years ago. Jack Friendly is the captain of this ship.

The second man is Fred Mindy, who is clearly on the phone with his wife. “No… ye… no, baby, what I said was… no… no… yes, of cours… no, yes, when I said you looked pretty in that i… what? Yes! Baby, of course i… no… no… but you… yes…” make up, in various assortments, the extent of the dialogue coming from Fred Mindy. Jack Friendly can hear all of this and wishes he couldn’t. If only his hearing had disappeared instead of his eyebrow.

“Yes, dear, I…”

Sighing, Jack Friendly leans forward and glances upward, through the windshield, at the flames licking the roof of the bus. As the fire spread, maybe it would burn off his other eyebrow. He hated having just the one. Jack Friendly thought of himself as being like the Batman villain Two-face, only he had just the one face… and the one stupid, black eyebrow. That would technically be a unibrow, wouldn’t it? An off-centre unibrow…

Jack Friendly was glad that the bus was on fire. Then, he remembered being a kid, at a specific point in time when another kid was telling him that people with unibrows were werewolves. He knew another kid named Rafael, who had a unibrow, but was not a werewolf. Maybe Rafael hadn’t had the right kind of unibrow… looking into the large overhead mirror, Jack Friendly smiled to himself at the thought of being a werewolf.

“Honey, I wasn’t looking at… no, I…” intoned Fred Mindy from his seat on the bus. “I can’t do that right now… I’m on a bu… ye… yeah, yes… yes, ok… ok, fine.” Hanging up his phone, Fred Mindy tugs on the little cable that lets the bus driver, in this case Jack Friendly, know that a passenger, in this case Fred Mindy, needs the driver of the bus to stop the bus.

Jack Friendly hears the little bell, and looks back at Fred Mindy via the mirror mentioned earlier. For a moment, he just stares. Finally, Jack says to Fred, “Sir…” but Fred Mindy interjects “I have to meet my wife…”

Jack Friendly continues, “We can’t stop here, this bus is on fire…”

To which Fred Mindy replies “I know. She’s waiting for me at a gas station.”

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