Susie begins to float on the way to school. Her head has been steadily rising over the gray-cushioned seats for the past three minutes. You’ve been watching her in the rearview mirror from the front of the bus, keeping one eye on the road and the other on Susie. This is very odd: kids should not be floating or have blood on their faces at 7:48 in the morning. You haven’t seen her blink yet, and there are still seven minutes until you arrive at school. Seven minutes until Susie is off your bus. 

Canbal Avenue is always busy before 8 in the morning, with road-raging office workers, kids chasing after school buses, and every now and then, a cannibal flying overhead to somewhere important.

Sometimes you’ll see a massive silhouette in the sky and think, wow, that is an absolute unit of a bird, but then it’ll get closer and nope, nope, that’s just a cannibal. Actually, wrong again: that is not just any cannibal, that is your senator flying to his office in the morning.

You looked in the rearview mirror again–did Susie move up a row? You thank the heavens that Susie is, was, in the very back, where a kid bit off another kid’s pinky finger last school year, and now no one wants to sit there anymore. The other kids have yet to notice Susie hovering behind them, but you know it’s just a matter of time before all descends into chaos.

You don’t get paid enough for this: they didn’t train you on how to deal with floating kids, and there are still six minutes left until you arrive at school.

You wish your parents could have afforded human flesh when you were younger, like Susie’s parents probably did. Then you wouldn’t be working this dead-end bus driver job and instead be flying to some fancy skyscraper where the cannibal elite have their coffee with a shot of human blood every morning.

How did the world become this way? The rich pay for the flesh of the poor. The poor pay for wealth with their body. And those that aren’t wealthy enough to afford flesh but not so desperate as to sell flesh remain grounded, forever chained down by the weight of living.