An excerpt from "Mrs. Grady" found in Pressure Points:

The snow has not started falling heavily yet as bus Number Three of the Clagemore Public School makes the turn on to Thorpe Road.  The street is wet and shimmering; some quality of the water suggests that freeze is coming, that heat is a fleeting quantity.  On the colder surfaces, flakes are clumping and growing in cold white colonies.  The bus chugs down Thorpe Road to the appointed and customary stop, where a group of five children stand shivering.  The youngest of the children is Brittany Chandler, age seven, first grade.  Her older brother Kevin stands well apart from her.  He is in fifth grade and does not wish to become too well associated with his sister.  He wipes a trickle of snot from his nose and stamps his feet.   A cold morning, rapidly becoming colder.

The children board the bus, Brittany wrinkling her nose at a smell she calls ‘farty’.  The driver says nothing.  The door slides shut like an accordion losing strength.  Bus Number three rolls on.

Off Thorpe Road onto Rogers Avenue, four blocks to the next stop.  The snowfall accelerates, in the true sense of the word, both falling more rapidly and slanting at a new angle as an unforecast wind seizes the reigns of the storm.  Five students board here.

The bus is a Blue Bird TC2000, manufactured in 1989.  It seats 66 students, though it has never been required to do so.  Bus Number Three, on this route, ordinarily transports 42 students.

But Renee Clausen, Mark Stover, and Ashlee Johnson are out ill with the most providential flu of their lives.  All three Simer children are absent today, gone on a trip with their parents, to sunny south Texas.  They will sit in front of their aunt’s television tonight, faces grown taut with horror and the vacant, wasted absence of understanding.

That is tonight, hours away.  Bus Number Three chugs away from the curb on Rogers Avenue and heads north.  Rogers avenue is an aberration in Clagemore, Oklahoma, as most north/south streets in this town are numbered, not named.  Bus Number Three turns left on Franklin Road and proceeds westward.  The sky is coughing significant amounts of snow now, and in the school administration building, Harvey Jacobs is fuming at the meteorologists for blowing it yet again.  If he could peer at the future waiting to fall like a coarse black hammer . . But of course he can not.  No one can.  We all live in a sort of ignorance.

 The driver of Bus Number Three turns on the wipers.  He pulls to a stop in front of the Simmons house on Franklin Street, where four children run up the bus steps, filled with hot chocolate that Adelle Simmons gave them a few minutes ago.  Adelle Simmons suffered a miscarriage a month ago, and tonight she will take her husbands shotgun, used so recently to hunt doves, and she will remove the top of her own head.  It will be left to the reader to determine if her suicide is connected to the events unfolding now, but I rather suspect it is.

Bus Number Three jumbles and growls down Franklin road.  The children aboard are uncustomarily quiet.  Many of them stare out the windows at the snowstorm, breath fogging windows.  You could call it peaceful, and why not?

The next stop is also on Franklin Road, where eight children climb aboard.  Heather Pheeters, Angie Mccally, Shannon Stork, and Ann Kelly are in the same fourth grade class and are best friends and chatter like a troop of monkeys, mostly about how cold they are.  Behind them, Greg Cooper stumbles on a step due to the fact that he is trying to walk while engrossed in an X-Men comic book.

The doors slide shut like a frozen whisper.

Bus Number Three of the Clagemore Public School District makes another left turn, this time to Allen street, and the next to last stop.  Seven children this time.  Now the bus fills with warmth, and some chatter, some freshly awoken mischeif.  Ol’ Ed Tolliver, the driver of this route, does not tolerate the merest mischeif.  Mischeif is his favorite word, at least the favorite that he may use on the bus, in front of children.  But Tolliver isn’t here this morning, and the substitute driver hasn’t said a word.

(Ed Tolliver is, at this moment, trying to scream.  He isn’t having a great deal of success.

This is because he no longer possesses a throat to scream with.  You will understand the difficulties this presents.  He slaps a hand to the wet and burning gap beneath his chin and reaches with the other toward the gray and white dog with the bloody muzzle.  A moment ago, the dog’s eyes blazed, but now the animal looks as confused as Tolliver himself.  Tolliver stumbles back against the tree in his back yard and slides down the trunk.  He has been engaged in the standoff with this dog for over an hour now, and a moment ago his rage toward missing the bus run boiled over and he said, “Oh, f’Pete’s sake!” and stepped toward his back door.  And the dog leapt.  Now missing the bus run seems trivial.  Now everything seems trivial.  Now Ed Tolliver, second born of Joseph and Oda Tolliver, husband to the late Sascha Catherine Tolliver, father to Stan Tolliver, pop-pop to Mark and Teddy Tolliver of Tulsa, Oklahoma, now Ed Tolliver dies.)

Bus Number Three hits the last stop, which typically is where the most children wait.  This morning is no different.  Eight children stand by the street, puffing little white ghosts of breath, snow battering them and accumulating on their small shoulders.  The door of the bus opens like a welcoming mouth and they pour in.

From here, Bus Number Three proceeds on it’s normal route for a time.  But at Main Street, where it would turn left toward Clagemore Elementary, the bus turns right.  It is snowing very heavily indeed now, and sticking as well.  The weather people are flummoxed; their models all called for warming, not this freak storm.  As a consequence, everyone is running late, unprepared for this early blast of winter.  Almost no one pays attention to Bus Number Three running westward.  Away from the center of town.  Toward the highway that leads to the interstate, to the wide world beyond.