Correction: Part of this piece was not included in the Literary issue, and here is the full version
1
Ragged jeans, rough, wispy brown hair, piercing blue eyes. The scenery outside my train car stretches on for miles. My eyes wander to the window, the desolate fields of corn, and back to her. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s around five-four. She sits half-draped in a light-green windbreaker, staring off into nothingness. Her lips, perfectly bow-shaped, are chapped and unpainted.
Her back is perfectly straight. She reminds me of stone statues in museums, regally postured and serene. Perhaps she is a daughter of royalty or of politicians, trained to maintain perfect self-possession under a spotlight. Perhaps she’s from a family of drug lords or prominent bankers or computer technicians. The aura of serenity about her entices me. I wonder what her purpose is of riding this desolate train.
I feel as though she’s watching me from the corner of one eye. I wonder what she sees. A commuter? A traveler seeking a new life, without a family tying her down, too old to still have the world at her fingertips? With my business suit, impractical heels, and leather briefcase, I wonder if I am part of the corporate landscape to her, an executive with expensive priorities, fancy lunch meetings in smoke-filled coffeehouses, empty corporate language. That’s how I see myself sometimes. I wonder if that is what I’ve become.
The woman twitches, wrenching my attention away from her face to her hands, tapping
incessantly. Long, bony fingers lay listlessly on her lap, entwined like a vine on a wall. She’s
tapping her narrow ring finger on her other hand at the pace of a heartbeat. The fingernails are
humble and brutally close-cut.
The waiflike girl, who can’t be older than twenty-five, carries herself as though much older. She possesses a dreamlike quality, almost ethereal, metaphysical, like smoke. I want to delve inside her mind, to view the world through her gaze, and discover if she sees it in shades of black and grey. I wonder what tragedies have impacted her perception, and what circumstances have seated her on the gnarled, sunken seats of this train, inhabited by transient figures, bodies of smoke each possessing their own stories, conundrums, and desires, their imprints already fading.
2
I sigh back into my minimally-cushioned seat and thumb through a business briefing. Dull words and statistics blur together into an ocean of emptiness. I cross my legs and smooth my suit. I’d hoped to be at least a bit productive.
“Hey,” she says. I start and drop the papers in my hand. Her voice is coarse, a similar consistency to her hair. I want to submerge myself in the texture of her words. I meet her startling eyes, which perforate me with urgency. “You were staring at me.” Her finger taps again, and the thin silver ring she’s wearing glints as sunlight slants through the dusty window.
“I apologize,” I whisper. I shake myself and extend my well-manicured hand. “I’m Ms. Baxter. Nice to meet you.” She briefly clasps her hand with mine. It’s startlingly cold. “Do you travel this way often?”
“Not often, no. My brother owns a railroad company a ways north of here, so I visit him occasionally.” Although her voice is nonchalant, I feel her eyes pass through me.
“Mhm. Do you live around here?”
Instead of responding, she leans down and picks up my briefings and hands them to me. “You dropped your papers.” Our hands almost touch.
“Thank you.”
She leans, straight-backed, against her seat again, her eyes drift back to the window.
I stare out my window. We’re approaching a tunnel, the rusty metal monster screeching along through the arid landscape. The light inside our car comes from only from the light outside of it. I don’t see a single light source on the train.
My papers fall again as we plunge into the darkness of the tunnel.
“Ms. Baxter.” Her rough voice cuts through the sudden dark.
“Yes?”
But she is silent. The train roars through the darkness, occasionally making small jolts as though to ensure we do not get too comfortable.
We emerge into a grey city. Layers of soot and ivy are in a process of colonizing once-magnificent stone-columned buildings. A dust-colored swallow lands in a boarded-up alcove which had once been a window, ruffles its feathers, and soars off.
“Look at it.” The girl abruptly leans over and tugs like a child on my sleeve.
3
The sound of a dusty bell ricochets through the train.
The woman stands, her wavy hair cascading down her back. She stuffs several scraps of paper into her jacket pocket and sways with the slowing train. A hint of a wry smile twists her lips. The slanted sunlight outlines her in a sparkling halo of dust.
“Is this your stop?”
It’s not. But I rise as the train screeches to a halt, never moving my eyes off of hers.
My briefcase abandoned, I step towards her, entranced, but she walks lightly down the aisle of the car. The disparity in out outfits makes us an odd pair.
“Have a good day, ladies!” the conductor calls as we step onto the platform.
I turn to watch as the train speeds away.
The air is crisp and frigid in the sudden silence. The woman wraps her cold, bony hand around my warmer, fleshier one and pulls me with her toward the ivy-coated city. “Come on. I have something to show you.” The wind carries her voice.
An image surfaces in my mind of two girl children running and laughing, one pulling the other by the hand.
“I didn’t catch your name.”
She glances over her shoulder toward me. We walk along a winding path, that narrows as we approach a Gothic-style building larger than the rest. The building is smoky grey, as are the others. Ivy coating the sunken windows gives the building its only life, lighting it in magnificent yellows and reds.
“Elena,” she says. “My name is Elena.”
Elena grips my fingers firmly and leads me through the doorway. We walk along corridors, past walls stacked with dust-covered volumes emitting an aroma of old knowledge. We emerge upon a stone precipice at the back entrance of the building, below which is a sooty, grey-blue pond. I cannot find my own face but see hers reflected in the murky water, pale, serene, ethereal.
Elena’s bony fingers dig into my hand. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I say. “It’s beautiful.”