V. The Train

A train pulled up at the station I was standing on. It was large and black and in strange pieces with machinery everywhere. It was unnerving seeing the wires and cables so close so I just concentrated on the inside of the carriage.

 

I stepped onto it. My necklace flared through the doorway and the conductor nodded at me. I stumbled, and took a seat away from the all the people. The train began to move shortly after I sat down, but the inside of the carriage looked stable and almost stagnant. There was vine of leaves growing across the wall and the roof with orange and red coloured autumn leaves. At my feet, near the roots, I could see mushrooms in a ring. I leaned down and touched one before looking up around at everyone in the carriage.

 

There was a few people on the train, a man in a mask reading his newspaper (that appeared to be growing and swallowing him whole, not that he appeared to mind). There were cats talking to one another and laughing in a language I didn’t recognise, with another more human figure visibly annoyed by this, and being wrapped and strangled by what looked like headphones. The cords had reached around his face and taken his eyes.

 

I saw a mother in charcoal with large tired eyes and a girl that was staring at me. She had pigtails either side of her head and her skin was a light shade of blue, that echoed and waved like the ocean. I smiled at her and waved, and she walked over. “Do you have any candy?” she said expectantly. I smiled and checked my pockets, finding a chocolate wrapped in silver paper. I passed it to her and she grinned and ran back to her mother.

 

As I watched her leave, my attention was caught by a falling leaf, and as it fell I looked through it, to see a boy. He was blonde, with blue eyes like the sky, and he was leaning back and smirking at me. There was something different about him. Something odd I couldn’t place.

I ran my eyes over him again, faded jeans and a black t-shirt. His arms were crossed over his chest. His gaze didn’t turn away when I looked at him, not like the others, but this wasn’t it. There was something too strange to get away from but I couldn’t find it. I found myself looking at my shoes to escape him but he was still looking when I glanced up. We both turned as the train reached a station and stopped.

 

He bit his lip and stood up, walking up near me, and then onwards, away from me. As he left and my eyes reached the others again it occurred to me what was strange about him.

He was, what I was.

I looked at my hands. I looked in the window and looked for the first time acknowledged my own existence and looked at my reflection. Blue eyes and long messy brown hair. I wore no mask. I was not strange. I was myself, and I was real… and so was he.

 

I turned back to the world I had found myself in and everything was questioned. Everything was strange. Everything was wrong. As if he was some underlying truth that I had not seen before but always knew.

 

The people previously found to be mildly humorous were grotesque and alien to me. In suddenly discovering myself, I had found the abyss of differences between everything I seemed to know and everything I seemed to sense. My head started to ache and as I realised the only person like me had left the train stations back, my heart started too.

 

I thought back before the ocean, to the forest and the field, but the memories were a hazy plane of glass, and there was something overall more disturbing about this, that ultimately, I felt as if there was something before that. Something far more important.

 

As hard as I tried, I could not remember what is was I was trying to remember, and at times on my drowsy journey I doubted the existence of this memory, but it seemed so important. I believed it was there. It was as if something was telling me that I was in the wrong place and wrong time and there was somewhere else waiting for me. Somewhere far away that I couldn’t place.

I left the train at the next station, beguiled.

 

Reviews

"There was a few people on the train, a man in a mask reading his newspaper (that appeared to be growing and swallowing him whole, not that he appeared to mind). There were cats talking to one another and laughing in a language I didn't recognise, with another more human figure visibly annoyed by this, and being wrapped and strangled by what looked like headphones. The cords had reached around his face and taken his eyes."

this reminds me of actually taking the train to school in bendigo everyday... I like the way you have taken a normal everyday scene and turned it into something fantastical.
my favourite is the man with the newspaper. It like he is getting sucked into believing that it's true whats written there, just like almost everyone who reads newspapers.