Strange And Beautiful Monsters

i ➴ welcome wagon [✓]

Addie stares out at sheeting rain and a slate sky as the bus rounds the exit ramp. She winces as the tires thud over a pothole, her already-numb rear slamming into the bench. She adjusts her earbuds and tries to settle back into place, temple pressed to the cold window.

The technicolor forests and sweeping hills lost their lustre hours ago, and once the rain rolled in, trying to immerse herself in the scenery became pointless. Her playlist was on its fifth repeat, but she didn't have a chance of spicing it up out in the middle of nowhere. Simply put, she's painfully bored, and no amount of offline mobile games can cure it.

Blessedly, the bus merges onto a four-lane main road instead of a desolate freeway, and the screen of trees starts to be punctuated with intersections and gas stations. Addie perks up, each McDonald's and Shell a sight for sore eyes. An actual town closes in not long after, with strip malls and Dutch Bros and everything. The traffic is slower going until the bus finds its terminal; intermittent glances at her watch tell Addie it takes about an hour.

She tries not to bounce in place as the bus starts unloading. When her turn comes, her knees and ankles pop dramatically, and she suppresses a groan. Then she's yanking her hoodie on and slinging her backpack over her shoulder, jamming curls under the hood in a bid to keep them dry. The sidewalk swims under her feet for a few seconds as she steps down from the bus.

Her first priority is a bathroom break. She follows the signs around the side of the terminal building to the women's, just planning on a quick refresher, and nearly freezes in surprise at the sight of actual shower stalls.

As much as she longs to scrub the layers of sweat and grime from her skin, she hesitates. It's raining after all, and she still has a long hike ahead and a schedule to keep -- a schedule that can't accommodate an approximate business week just to wash her hair. With a final lingering look at the showers, she ducks into a toilet stall.

[...]

A half hour later, Addie feels at least slightly more like a person with clean teeth, clean skin, and clean clothes. She wanders outside and settles onto a wooden bench tucked under the building's overhang. She plugs her phone into her last portable charging bank and pulls vitamin water and the map and compass from her backpack. She spreads the map across her lap, twists the bottle cap off with her teeth, and orients the map to her current cardinal direction.

The town is just a speck on the map that she has to almost put her nose the paper to see. Her finger traces the major roads toward the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest to the north. Almost ten miles by freeway, if she's done the math right. Her feet twinge.

She takes a long swig of vitamin water, then packs everything back into the bag except the compass, which goes into her front jeans pocket. A quick glance at her watch reminds her she has two hours until sundown; two hours to gather as much info as she can, hunt down some dinner, and find a cheap motel.

She makes another circuit of the building to find doors, and enters into a dim, wide room, with maps and ads crammed onto every inch of the walls. Vending machines cluster in an opposite corner, and an unmanned information desk stands in the center. A graying banner hangs from the ceiling, reading "WELCOME TO EDUN!" Addie picks out bus schedules and a couple regional maps from the array at the desk, takes a ridiculous glow-in-the-dark pen just because she likes it, and digs change out of her backpack to buy a handful of snacks from the machines.

She checks her watch again -- hour and a half. Satisfied with her spoils, she heads back outside and orders an Uber from the curb, thankful for the public terminal WiFi. She scours the town map for diners while she waits for the car, finally settling on an undoubtedly local place called Betty's only two miles away. Her Uber driver is another black woman, and they ride in comfortable quiet, occasionally chatting, to the diner.