Train
My family took a train across the country when I was ten.
This train had an observation deck on the top of one of the middle passenger cars. It was a bubble of thick glass reinforced by a thin grid of metal. There was a long oval of couches around the edge of it for people to sit down and look at the landscape passing by. The passengers went up there during the day. It was shut down at night to prevent amorous couples from using the room for trysts.
At night it was empty. Most people were downstairs in the bar or trying to sleep.
Like I said, I was ten. I found a way with my little hands to jimmy the lock. Quiet as a snake, I’d go up there with my sister. During the trip, other children found out what we were doing and went up there as well. There in the darkness, it belonged to us.
We’d lie on our backs and look up at the millions of stars looking back down on us. The stars were not obscured by city lights. We could clearly see the disc of the Milky Way. The whole splash across the night sky looked like clouds of light rather than individual pinpricks of brightness. Trees would flicker by in our peripheral vision but the sky did not move. The vibration of the night-time train was beneath our backs and the stars were above us.
We were well-behaved during the day. We were hypnotized by the sky at night. We coasted through our days looking forward to the stars.
One night while we were doing this, we went into a tunnel. We all screamed as the sky disappeared and the train’s engine doubled in volume.
This ended our little clandestine trespass into the observation deck. The parents came running. We thought the world had ended.
I feel like that now.
tags
This train had an observation deck on the top of one of the middle passenger cars. It was a bubble of thick glass reinforced by a thin grid of metal. There was a long oval of couches around the edge of it for people to sit down and look at the landscape passing by. The passengers went up there during the day. It was shut down at night to prevent amorous couples from using the room for trysts.
At night it was empty. Most people were downstairs in the bar or trying to sleep.
Like I said, I was ten. I found a way with my little hands to jimmy the lock. Quiet as a snake, I’d go up there with my sister. During the trip, other children found out what we were doing and went up there as well. There in the darkness, it belonged to us.
We’d lie on our backs and look up at the millions of stars looking back down on us. The stars were not obscured by city lights. We could clearly see the disc of the Milky Way. The whole splash across the night sky looked like clouds of light rather than individual pinpricks of brightness. Trees would flicker by in our peripheral vision but the sky did not move. The vibration of the night-time train was beneath our backs and the stars were above us.
We were well-behaved during the day. We were hypnotized by the sky at night. We coasted through our days looking forward to the stars.
One night while we were doing this, we went into a tunnel. We all screamed as the sky disappeared and the train’s engine doubled in volume.
This ended our little clandestine trespass into the observation deck. The parents came running. We thought the world had ended.
I feel like that now.
tags