This story is Escrisal 2, and if you’re not familiar with the phrase, click on the tag for this post and it will take you to the first entry that explains what (and why) it exists.

I broke the 300 word rule.  In fact, I broke it for #1.  So let’s call that one more of a suggestion than a guideline.  :)  Everything’s coming in around 380.

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The hills were sleeping lions, tawny flanks baking in the California sun.  To Walter Groves, they felt more alive than his passengers.   His Greyhound was weaving through the torpor of high noon at fifty miles an hour, a hurtling gray pill filled with ten sleeping bodies.  In the oversized mirror hanging above his head Walter could watch them with their backs flattened to their seats and their heads nodding and swinging with the curves of the coastal highway.  They seemed more like ragdolls than human beings.  And meanwhile the hills were flashing their golden manes of wheat at every turn and dabbling rocky paws in the Pacific, as if only moments away from the hunt, as if the right scent or the right sound would muster them into wakefulness, and only Walter would see them stir. 

                The bus made an odd rumbling noise; Walter heard it as a growl that shook the cabin.  The highway before him was a long black line; a lion’s soot covered tail, ending in a tuft of willows.  He looked up and as startled to see eyes blinking in the hills.  They were emerald and slit like a cat’s.  A mouth opened beneath them—rows of long white teeth, like sun-bleached logs strung together with barbed wire.  A red carpet emerged from a lion’s yawning face and found no parable in nature.  Walter stood stricken by the vision, found his hands in the wheat, in the feline fur.  Where should they be?  Surely not stroking these soft golden stalks that sprouted from the sides of lions.  He heard the beast growl again, felt it through the seat of his pants.  It jogged loose urgent thoughts that had been growing in the slow corners of his brain.  

                He was not alone.  He was not on safari. He was Walter Groves.  He was not driving his bus.

                His head jerked up off his chest.  He looked up, saw a flashing field of blue and white.  In the mirror all his passengers were astronauts, floating up out of their seats.  A nickel passed before his eyes, moving strangely, right to left.  He followed its movement with his head and saw the cliffs, the rocky paws of lions.  They lunged parallel to the bus, past his window, into a wall of water.  That, and the hideous silence, tore a scream from his throat.  From the part of him that remained an observer came the thought that it was a primal, jungle sound.