dumping
She was still a long time, looking out the train window. Uncultivated green oscillated too close to the tracks, sometimes smacking against the cars only to pull growing hands back as if scorched. The leaves looked all the same, all the same shape and size and all unending, and close. It was almost claustrophobic, and if I couldn't feel the reassuring k-k-cha-thunk of the wheels on the rails that promised me we were moving, I think I'd have been afraid. Suddenly, the wall of high weeds opened to show an old farm, barely glimpsed, and gone before either of us was sure it had been there. Then the green again, unending until the next possible blip of sight. She startled me when she spoke, her tone low from the deep part of her.
"Sometimes you're on a train, watching miles and acres and concessions of trees and green things go by," she said, "without even seeing a single car, and then all of a sudden, you'll see a rain-rubbed, not-red barn out of the green. You know it's full of rusting iron machines and lost tools, and stale bales of hay, and you also know it has held life. Almost before you've had time to see it, the house it belongs to shoots by, peeling paint that used to be white, the birthplace of children who used to be innocent. You see its cut lawn and its bird-picked orchard, and the hopeful cornfield that toys with the fortunes and dreams of a farmer's finances, and it breaks your heart, because you see the kind of life that follows the clock of the kind of people who fear God, and you know you don't belong. You feel like Cain, and you don't belong."
The thrumming silence of the train closed over her words. She hadn't even turned her head from the window to speak, and she didn't turn it now, just kept staring at the ever-changing, ever-stretching wall of leaves.
"Sometimes you're on a train, watching miles and acres and concessions of trees and green things go by," she said, "without even seeing a single car, and then all of a sudden, you'll see a rain-rubbed, not-red barn out of the green. You know it's full of rusting iron machines and lost tools, and stale bales of hay, and you also know it has held life. Almost before you've had time to see it, the house it belongs to shoots by, peeling paint that used to be white, the birthplace of children who used to be innocent. You see its cut lawn and its bird-picked orchard, and the hopeful cornfield that toys with the fortunes and dreams of a farmer's finances, and it breaks your heart, because you see the kind of life that follows the clock of the kind of people who fear God, and you know you don't belong. You feel like Cain, and you don't belong."
The thrumming silence of the train closed over her words. She hadn't even turned her head from the window to speak, and she didn't turn it now, just kept staring at the ever-changing, ever-stretching wall of leaves.