"The Ossington Bus" is an all too brief introduction to Russell Smith's precise, elegant prose style. Please do stop over the sentences and appraise their condensed, fluid motions. E.g. "We have looked at our watches, looked at our watches and prayed, wept and prayed and looked at our watches." The story itself is a small gem of an ever so slightly parodic magic realism planted in Toronto's Little Portugal wherein the oft missing Toronto Transit Commission's Ossington Avenue bus takes on legendary qualities. I also thought of E. M. Forster and his story "The Celestial Omnibus" when I first read this --- Forster's nostalgia for the magical, especially in his stories is often overlooked. Russell Smith is careful and charming: his irony never becomes arch and the language, alternating between irony and belief, builds a momentum that magically gives that bus wings at the story's close.