The bus trip from Vienna to Trogir, Croatia takes twelve hours and rolls overnight.  As the monster idles–half the passengers taking final drags on cigarettes and patting at their relatives–a mother helps her teenaged son to his seat. The mother gazes around the bus that would carry her boy away. He walks her back out, embraces and kisses her, then boards calmly and settles in.

She waits on the platform, requiring confirmation that the trip was underway before she would go home. Her son makes kind gestures to his worried mother outside. The bus is so tall, the windows so high, that she looks up at her son like a cat trapped in a tree. The departure is three minutes behind schedule already (a sign it is not an Austrian bus line) and in those three minutes, she switches between studying her watch and convincing herself not to board again…