Bus stop exercise by Osemhen

In 2007, only 4% of students reported being bullied.

The statistic is an earworm in his head. Over and over. The words chase each other. Indicting him. How does he explain it to his son’s mother? He can not, he will not go home with this.

Perhaps if he stands just so, close enough to the queue so that he looks like he too is waiting for a bus and far enough that others can join the queue in front of him, he will not draw attention. No one will notice. That he’s been standing on the same spot for thirty five minutes, and that seven LAMATA buses, three of them completely empty, have come and gone and he still stands there.

Waiting. For the sheer normalcy of the world to crack.

3.37 pm (Bus stop story prompt by Olumide)

If they would hold him now they could get him now before he reaches there. If they would grab his arm or maybe his leg or his neck or something, grab something, they could stop him then, stop him, these people could stop him before he reaches that place. These people crowding round, sweaty and smelly, with their “eh yahs” and “ah ahns” around the man, the man on the floor who is mad, surely mad no doubt he is mad these people could stop him before he reaches it.

Bus stop writing prompt by Funke

I am on my haunches, still.
 

I wish I hadn’t picked my friend’s call.
 

I wouldn’t have heard his voice whispering though my ear piece. 
 

The air around me has ceased to move. I throw off my jacket – It is hot.
 

“Where are you” he asked me?
 

“Ladipo bus stop” I replied.
 

You are two bus stops from the spot where it happened, it was ghastly…

 

Bus stop attempt by Doris

Slowly, as though in a dream, my vision at first blurred, focuses on the wet red tomatoes across the roadside in front of me. I am fascinated by the beads of water with tiny bits of sunlight glistening on them. I stare at the woman screaming at passersby to buy her tomatoes and ata rodo, she reminds me of a female Buddha, with her slits for eyes and rotund figure.

I cannot remember how, and when I got here, I do not know why I am seated here on the pavement, next to the gutter. My freshly starched white kaftan is smeared with mud, shit, and all sorts of rubbish.

“Meeeeeriiiiiilllaaaand! Ojotajotajota”!

“Ojota –ketu-mile12”!

“Ikeja insideeeeee

It is rush hour and everywhere around me I see tired, angry and anxious faces, impatient to get home.
Motorist blare their horns in competition, commuters stand in endless queues waiting for buses.
I feel removed from the scene before me, I feel numb, I feel nothing.

The Bus Stop Piece by Gboyega

Flashes. Flashes are all I see now. The buses come. The buses go. But me, I am numb.

I sit in a world of blindness, of darkness, of dust and ashes. So much noise, so much movement and yet there is no joy here. There is only pain. Pain, pain, more pain that never ends. That is what is here. That is what this world gives.
 

Flashes. The bright yellow buses with their two black horizontal stripes. Another one arrives. The next minute it is gone, fading away with its passengers, lost to the darkness. Lost to me.

Bus Stops by Tahirah Abdulazeez

He shuffles forward, one foot in front of the other methodically. In front of him a small crowd gathers. They are busy, all of them. Talking, hustling, and being alive in noisy intrusive ways. The sun boils in a stark pitiless sky . It ripens the mid day smells, cooking food mingles with rotting trash nearby and people smells, of fatigue and stress, the biology of struggle and it stains him, clings to him. The world is a hallucinatory haze and the images before him are like spirits, a blur of colours, pink, red and blue;and noise.

Essay question: The Bus Stop exercise

Hi, all.

Sorry for the hiatus, it’s inexcusable. You’d expect writers to well… write fairly constantly, wouldn’t you? And some of us have been writing on our own blogs. Pemi, for one, writes every week on AfroSays and TheToolsman’s Blog. Glory writes on BellaNaija, and every now and then, Osemhen puts up a post on Eurekanaija.

This week, we gave ourselves an exercise to do.
The exercise (posted below) was interpreted by the members of the group and their story answers are posted as well.
Help us judge which stories work and which don’t. And who answers the exercise question best.

A middle-age man is waiting at a bus stop. He has just learned that his son has died violently. Describe the setting from the man’s point of view WITHOUT telling your reader what has happened. How will the street look to this man? What are the sounds? Odors? Colors? That this man will notice? What will his clothes feel like? Write a 300 word description.