(This is a couple of paragraphs I wrote for the new novel I’ve been working on – I don’t think I am going to keep the scene this was part of, but I kind of like this part)

I found my bus and boarded it, with four minutes to spare.  I settled in with the other passengers, and was relieved when the bus lurched forward with no one sitting next to me.  Still cold from the short walk to the station, I leaned my head against the window and watched the lit up skyscrapers and the slow streams of headlights on the expressway.  I could feel the warmth from the registers as I listened to the murmuring whisper of the blowers.  I started nodding off, my head against the window, in the reflections of the buildings and the headlights, in the warm hum of heat.  I was on my way home.

When I woke I was warm and the bus was out of the city, on the interstate, deep into the vast blackness of the flat county terrain, interrupted only by the occasional barn light or yellow front porch light some late arriver forgot to turn off.   Frost was forming on the top outside of the windows.  Moonlight shone on a blanket of snow.   Every now and then we’d pass a farmhouse lit up enough to reveal smoke pouring out of its chimney.  It was a bitterly cold night.

As the bus approached the exit, I could see, in the distance, the faint yellow lights of my town glowing in the midnight black, twenty minutes of cold darkness away from the interstate.   The flat and empty and darkened winter farm land looked cold and barren, making the glow of my town on the horizon seem warm and inviting.  It’d be two o’clock on a Wednesday morning when the bus pulled into the Sinclair station on Main Street; from there it’d be about a five block walk through the sleeping town until I was home.