Ten minutes later, I was sitting in my kitchen, eating Rice Krispy cereal sprinkled heavily with Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs, wondering if the whole bus thing had actually happened. Everything seemed so normal. It was a typical Sunday and the house was quiet, dad was still busy at the university, and Uncle Magnum would be here in less than an hour. Nothing had changed, yet it felt like everything was different. Something had happened to me, or I made something happen. I wasn’t going crazy. I’d read too many books and seen too many movies where the main character convinced themselves that they were misremembering something incredible that just happened to them. Denying your observations of reality doesn’t make sense. If you don’t trust your own mind, you’ll go crazy and if your mind is playing tricks on you, then you are crazy. Better to start with the assumption that you’re not crazy and see where it gets you. That is, until it brings you to a point where you’re about to do yourself any harm. Besides, I clearly remember that bus greying out. I remember the quiet and I definitely remembered the pain of snapping back.

I took my dishes to the sink, rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher. Having been to my friends’ houses, I’m aware that this is not normal teenage behavior, but since it’s just dad and me here, if I didn’t do it now, I’d just end up doing it later. Dad’s pretty neat and he expects me to be too. At work he cleans his tools and put them away at the end of each day and he’s the same at home. He doesn’t clean up after me and I don’t clean up after him. We split the cooking chores and the laundry and Stella comes in twice a week to do the cleaning and change the sheets. It’s been that way since I turned ten. Before that dad would help me clean up and do chores and before that mom used to split the housework with him. Mom hasn’t been around since I was four.

While I’m semi-distracted with my thoughts on what I’m already mentally calling “The Bus Incident”, I go to my room and change into my Kung Fu clothes; loose black pants, a sports bra and a white t-shirt. When I go to Uncle Magnum’s Kung Fu studio, I also put on white socks and slippers, and I wear the traditional button up jacket as well. Here, at home, we practice informally. We just need to wear clothing that won’t rip when we do the splits or crouch in horse-stance.

I hate horse-stance. Imagine sitting on a chair, with your legs spread at around 90 degrees, and then removing the chair and staying steady. Now do that for four or five minutes, without moving. It really sucks. But wait, there’s more, if you sign up now you can also make sure that your back is straight, your hips are thrust forward and that your arms are bent at your sides with your elbows trying to touch behind your back. Did I mention that I hate horse-stance?

The weather is nice out today, so we’ll practice in the backyard. On cooler days, we work out in The Parlor. At least that’s what Uncle Magnum calls it and he always says it in a snooty British accent that makes you see the capitals in your mind. Dad and I just call it the den. It all goes back to when we were first being shown the house. Dad, Uncle Magnum and I were getting a tour from the university’s real estate agent lady and she was going on and on about all the features of the house and when we got to the den she explained how large the parlor was and how we’d have such a good time entertaining guests there. I was only 6 years old then, but even I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Dad doesn’t entertain. I remember seeing Uncle Magnum look over at dad and they both smiled. Uncle Magnum’s smile was laced with irony, as he knew dad too, but dad’s smile was wistful, and I could almost see him reliving old memories. Mom was the entertainer in the family. She would have loved this room. She would have filled it with life and people, and even though I was only six, I knew right then that we were going to take the house. Dad would take it because mom would have loved it.

Warm up consisted of ten minutes of meditation, five minutes of horse-stance (Uggh!), fifteen minutes of various muscle stretching exercises, and five minutes of straight-arm plank on my knuckles. Plank isn’t as bad as horse-stance, since you can get used to plank. It takes a long time, but it eventually gets easier. I set the timer on my phone and got started.

During mediation, your mind isn’t supposed to focus on anything; clearing away all thought was the goal. You’re supposed to simply feel the energy in your body and try to focus it towards your core. It wasn’t working for me today. My mind needed to go over The Bus Incident; to examine each second that I could remember. I needed to be methodical about it. I knew from my Kung Fu training that if I could break down a move into its individual parts, then I’d be able to do it, with enough practice. Uncle Magnum says that it takes over 10,000 repetitions of a move in order to perfect it. In this case, figuring out what move I needed to make was the real challenge.

Ok. Relax. Concentrate on your breathing. The bus was going to hit me, and it didn’t. I went through the bus. Wait. Did I go through it or did it go through me? Shit! I hate philosophy. I like things black or white. Shades of grey piss me off. The glass is half full. Yes, the tree makes a sound. 42 angels can dance on the head of a pin. Ok. Focus. The bus. It veered away from the idiot girl on her cellphone and not watching where she was going as she wandered into the path of the bus. The bus swerves into my path and turns into a ghost bus.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Nooo…, that’s not right. The bus didn’t turn into a ghost. It kept going and hit the building. I turned into a ghost. From my perspective, the bus greyed out, but for the bus, I wasn’t there. No one on the bus saw my upper body coming out of the floor of the bus. To them, I wasn’t there. Well, actually, they had all disappeared before I ghosted out, so they couldn’t have seen me. So the first weird thing that happened was that the people went away, then it was the bus, and later it was the buildings.

Why wouldn’t they all go away at once? What did the stages represent? Light to heavy? Little to big? Levels of mobility? Lifespan? Damn. This isn’t getting me anywhere. I’m trying to figure out the theory behind something that has only occurred once. I need more points of reference. I need to figure out how to do it again, make some new observations and then I can try to come up with a theory.

So, what else happened? After the buildings were gone, I ended up in an empty town, bare dirt all around me. I heard the quiet, took a step forward and got that major cramp feeling. Then my whole body felt a pulling and I was back from wherever it was that I went to. It’s weird how that almost elastic pull was only one way. I didn’t feel any stretching when I ghosted out. Maybe, as I ghosted out farther and farther out, I was stretching the elastic and when I went too far, I got pulled back. That’s great, but I still need to initiate the stretch.

How did I do it the first time? All I did was freeze up. I didn’t move at all. Humph. If that was a requirement, I’d be ghosting right now in my meditation. Could it be that I was scared out of my mind? I’ve been scared before, though. Terrified, in fact. But I didn’t ghost out then. I almost wish I had. Focus! Danger? Maybe my subconscious recognized that I about to die and activated a previously unknown ability. That sounded neat but wouldn’t help me much. I wasn’t about to go around risking my life to test out a theory. I had to find a way to kickstart my ability without putting myself in mortal danger. I suppose a good scare might do it, but how do you scare yourself?

I heard a questioning “Hello?” coming from the house.

“Out here, Uncle Magnum! You’re early. I haven’t warmed up yet.”

“Perfect! We can warm up together. I’ll get you a staff for horse-stance”. I groaned out loud as he walked into the yard. He gave me an innocent smile. He knows how much I despise horse stance and he enjoyed my pain. I think that all Kung Fu master’s are sadists at heart.

“Why are you complaining? Your horse-stance is excellent. You’ve been doing it since you were four. Besides, maybe if you called me by my real name, I wouldn’t want to torture you so much.” Now it was my turn to smile. Uncle Magnum’s real name is Paul Metzstein. He’s my mom’s older brother. He’s 5’11”, bald as a cue ball (by choice), and very fit. However, the giant 1970’s mustache plastered on this upper lip is his most noticeable feature. From the first time that I saw Tom Selleck playing Magnum P.I. on dvd, I changed Uncle Paul’s name to Uncle Magnum. I even made the ‘mistake’ of referring to him as Uncle Magnum in class once. Somehow it caught on and now he’s Sifu Magnum to all of his students. It’s way better than Sifu Paul and I’ve been trying to get him to change the name of school to Magnum’s Kung Fu. I think that he only pretends to be offended by it. He does give you extra push-ups to do during plank if you call him Sifu Magnum, but he’ll find any excuse to give you extra push-ups, so I don’t take that seriously.

We did our stretching and soon started in on forms. Forms are like little dances with specific moves. Each move is a strike or a block, or both at once. Each form is named after an animal and has a different style of striking. We went through Tiger, Leopard, Crane, Dragon, and Serpent forms. I was all sweaty by the time we started sparring. Sparring is my favorite part of Kung Fu. While a lot of Kung Fu is endless repetition to drill in muscle memory, sparring is always different, and you have to think quickly. You have to watch for openings and think about the best way to get in, all while making sure that your defense is strong, because getting kicked in the face really sucks. Also, I love attacking people. You don’t get to do that in everyday life.

After class, Uncle Magnum and I went inside. He went in for a quick shower and told me to do 15 minutes of work with the dummy as a cool down. A Kung Fu dummy is a round cylinder of wood that simulates an opponent. It has two wooden arms sticking out from the top, one from the middle, and one wooden leg coming out of the bottom. You can practice all of your strikes and blocks and kicks on it. The fact that you’re hitting a block of wood also helps your arm bones get used to taking punishment. We named our dummy Ed. I can’t remember why, but it fit. Ed was special, in that he’s a moving dummy; meaning you can set it up so that when you hit an arm it could rotate in a circle and hit you from the other side. When we changed from a stationary dummy to the moving one, I got whacked a lot by that arm. I kept forgetting that Ed could move, and that arm kept surprising the hell out of me. I wonder if there was a way for me to forget about it again. That would be a perfect way to test out the theory. When Uncle Magnum leaves, I’ll be trying that out.