due South morning drabbling
Just a little drabble that came to me this morning.
399 words of Ray, Fraser, and trains at night. Unbeta'ed, kind of dreamy, because I'm not really awake yet.
Trains
When Ray was a kid, he lived in a neighborhood criss-crossed by train tracks. Freight trains rode them back and forth, between the slaughterhouses and the distant cattle ranches in Colorado, California, places he only knew from John Wayne movies and Bonanza. Ray fell asleep and woke up to the rising-falling wail of the train whistles, which seemed to carry one kind of wildness in to the city and another back out.
One warm summer night in July found Ray and Fraser collapsing exhausted into beds in a motel room on the Iowa border. They’d chased the bad guy, found the bad guy, and left the bad guy in the local lock-up so they could get some much-needed rest before taking him back to the city in the morning. As Ray was drifting into sleep, which happened about two seconds after his head touched the pillow, he heard the howl of a train in the distance.
The next morning Fraser was oddly irritable, and Ray was oddly chipper. Chipper in the sense that he was able to ask Fraser how he had slept and he did it before coffee and without growling, grunting, or indicating any other perfectly reasonable displeasure at the fact that the sun had decided to rise, again, without Ray’s permission.
Fraser, on the other hand, did growl as he replied that it was rather hard to get into a full, healthy REM cycle when one was woken up every two hours by the train whistles as they sped by.
Ray offered to drive so Fraser could sleep. Well, he wouldn’t have let Fraser drive anyway, but it seemed like a nice thing to say.
As they headed back east that day, it didn’t occur to Ray to wonder why it was that he had managed to sleep so soundly while Fraser, who had slept inside dead animals had not.
He didn’t remember that he had, in fact, woken up once during the night. He’d thought he was ten for just a minute, and then fell back to sleep and dreamed that Bobby Hull had won the World Series for the Cubs when he slid the puck right past third base and into home, on a baseball diamond that was etched out on a vast hockey rink, an ice field that stretched out gleaming white and cold and beautiful as far as the eye could see.
**end**
399 words of Ray, Fraser, and trains at night. Unbeta'ed, kind of dreamy, because I'm not really awake yet.
Trains
When Ray was a kid, he lived in a neighborhood criss-crossed by train tracks. Freight trains rode them back and forth, between the slaughterhouses and the distant cattle ranches in Colorado, California, places he only knew from John Wayne movies and Bonanza. Ray fell asleep and woke up to the rising-falling wail of the train whistles, which seemed to carry one kind of wildness in to the city and another back out.
One warm summer night in July found Ray and Fraser collapsing exhausted into beds in a motel room on the Iowa border. They’d chased the bad guy, found the bad guy, and left the bad guy in the local lock-up so they could get some much-needed rest before taking him back to the city in the morning. As Ray was drifting into sleep, which happened about two seconds after his head touched the pillow, he heard the howl of a train in the distance.
The next morning Fraser was oddly irritable, and Ray was oddly chipper. Chipper in the sense that he was able to ask Fraser how he had slept and he did it before coffee and without growling, grunting, or indicating any other perfectly reasonable displeasure at the fact that the sun had decided to rise, again, without Ray’s permission.
Fraser, on the other hand, did growl as he replied that it was rather hard to get into a full, healthy REM cycle when one was woken up every two hours by the train whistles as they sped by.
Ray offered to drive so Fraser could sleep. Well, he wouldn’t have let Fraser drive anyway, but it seemed like a nice thing to say.
As they headed back east that day, it didn’t occur to Ray to wonder why it was that he had managed to sleep so soundly while Fraser, who had slept inside dead animals had not.
He didn’t remember that he had, in fact, woken up once during the night. He’d thought he was ten for just a minute, and then fell back to sleep and dreamed that Bobby Hull had won the World Series for the Cubs when he slid the puck right past third base and into home, on a baseball diamond that was etched out on a vast hockey rink, an ice field that stretched out gleaming white and cold and beautiful as far as the eye could see.
**end**