The Bus by Shirley Jackson

An analysis and appreciation

“Hell you say!”

Oh, my! Possibly my favourite of Shirley Jackson’s dark short stories, The Bus is a gold mine of symbolism and between-text readings.

“Old Miss Harper was going home.”

So innocently starts the story, but once we have unpacked everything we encounter in this most Twilight Zone of her stories, those innocent words take on a dark meaning.

Miss Harper is lonely. She’s bitter. She has been cruel, and is still inclined to be, but she is also aware of it. “Perhaps the bus company will write a complaint about me,” she muses at one point. She may even be regretting it and the isolation it has brought on her.

She boards the bus, lugging her heavy suitcase, longing for the warmth of home and shelter from the cold and rain. She is significantly surrounded by, but isolated from, the other passengers.

She has taken a sleeping pill, and in her semi-sleeping state she meets, or dreams—it’s ambigious which—a girl who is running away from home and tells her not to. That she’ll regret it.

She awakes to be turned off at a place she doesn’t know: Rickets Landing. Alone and scared, she flags down a truck that takes her to a deteriorating old house tended by an owner who keeps uttering, “Hell you say.”

“I lived in a house like this.”

“Hell you say.”

Yes, it’s that obvious, in parts.

Of course, it’s ambiguous whether Miss Harper is still dreaming when she realises she is back in her childhood home, except that everything is backwards and riddled with decay.

It becomes less ambiguous when she finds her old toys and discovers that they hate her. “The smile was painted on,” Jackson muses deeply, of the doll Miss Harper once loved.

Mercifully, Miss Harper wakes from this nightmare only to be put off the bus for real. Or so we assume. At a place she doesn’t know called Rickets Landing.

On the surface, it’s a time loop nightmare, but what’s the deeper meaning?

Rickets is, of course, a childhood disease. Did she suffer?

Was the girl who was running away from home the ghost of Miss Harper past? We are invited to suspect it. Did she run away from home when she was able, or did she regret not doing so?

The bus. The carrier on a journey. Life? Was Miss Harper’s life travelled on a metaphorical, creaking, unkempt bus, filled with passengers who would only stare but not talk to her or help?

The heavy suitcase carrying cologne. The baggage. The baggage of Miss Harper’s life, which she can't leave behind?

She has taken a sleeping pill. Is she self-euthanising? Is this her slipping away into her own oblivion? Is the warmth she so covets the comfort she imagines on the other side?

That's how I read it: as a dark, sorry tale of an old woman, bitter from a childhood disease, who ran away from a degrading home, going home for one last time. Forever. To her own hell.

Of course, it’s not a joyful reading. The fascination with stories like these is not that we find happy endings, because we do not. It’s that they are powerful literature.

They are simple stories on one level. They are ghoulish fantasies on another. They are confrontations of our existential fears on yet another.

As you may know, my love of The Haunting of Hill House is because of this opportunity for multi-level reading.

One must also consider that certain aspects of Jackson’s lead female characters, and their troubled relationships with husbands, famliies, and houses, are surely somewhat autobiographical.

The Bus is recompiled in Pengiun’s Dark Tales, which is the book I am progressing through in this series, and was first published in the Indianapolis Saturday Evening Post on March 27, 1965.