Midnight Bus

🌙 Today I decided to conduct a literary experiment. I wrote a short story with a rather severe constraint. I won't reveal the rule until the end. See if you notice anything unusual about the language.

Midnight Bus

At 12:04, a bus slid up to a stop that had not had a bus in forty long autumns. No lamps lit its windows. On its roof sat a black cat in a conductor's cap.

“All aboard,” said this cat.

“To what town?” I said.

“Not a town. A possibility.”

I had no coat, no cash, and no wish to go out, but curiosity is a poor guardian of comfort. I got on.

Four souls sat in a row. A girl had a jar full of light. An old man had a violin with no strings. A woman was guarding a tiny gold crown on a satin cushion. A small boy was trying to fold a fish out of a bus map.

Our bus ran without a sound. Not a bump, not a hiss.

Through a window I saw my own flat, but with a bright coral door. I had always thought of painting that door coral. In this flat, a man who was my twin was cooking soup, singing off pitch, and laughing.

“Who is that?” I said.

“You, on a road you did not walk,” said our cat.

At a crossroads, a woman got off. I saw a hall full of folk bowing to a woman in a gold crown.

At a farm, our old man got off and took up a violin. Out of it rang a sound so loud and rich that a flock of crows burst from a distant oak.

Our small boy did not look up from his map.

“Your stop?” I said.

“I don't know,” said that boy. “I didn't ask for this trip.”

“Nor did I.”

“That's odd,” said our cat, polishing its cap. “All of you bought a pass.”

“Not I,” I said. “I had no cash.”

“No cash is sought. A pass costs a night lost to what-ifs.”

Nobody said a word for a long, long span.

Soon our bus ran to a halt by a dark pond. My own flat, with its old brown door, stood just past a row of poplars. Indoors, a lamp was on. I could go in, warm my hands, and finish my soup.

“Is this my stop?” I said.

“Only if you wish.”

“And if I stay aboard?”

“Many towns. Many doors. No final stop.”

I took a long look at that coral door, far away now, small as a coin in my palm.

I got off. As our bus slid away, I saw that small boy sitting up front. At last, his origami fish was in motion. It swam out of his hands, past our cat, and into a sky full of stars.

That girl with a jar of light took off its lid. A thousand tiny suns shot out, bobbing around his fish.

Our cat put a paw to its cap.

I ran indoors and found a pot of soup waiting on my hob. It was cold. I lit a gas ring and sat watching it boil, humming off pitch.

At dawn, I bought a can of coral paint.

The secret

The entire story—509 words, including its title—contains not a single letter E.

This is called a lipogram: a form of constrained literature. The French novelist Georges Perec famously wrote an entire novel, La Disparition (1969), without using the letter E.

I wanted to see whether I could write something that felt like a natural story, rather than a linguistic acrobatic performance, under the same restriction.

I checked the finished text programmatically: zero occurrences of E.

And I particularly enjoyed the irony that a story about alternative lives was itself written in a language from which an enormous number of possibilities had been removed.

The protagonist's final decision—to paint a door rather than travel forever among imaginary doors—was my little rebellion against the constraint.

Sometimes the interesting thing isn't what you could have done, but what you decide to do next. 🌿