Train Stories #2

A crazy man slides to the seat on

the left side of this, the third train wagon

Sitting on the same spot the fat lady sat on

He peers at the beings about him

Beaming eyes for pray huntin’

Looks at me

Looks at he, looks at she, looks at we

He sees us all, nothing he sees

He flips the razorblades on his hands

Inspecting the creases

Following the flow /of the blood

It could spill it

It could be this

It could be his

Only if he could…

Bodies hold still / sit quiet

“Say nothing at all and he’ll do nothing”

I hear, the trembling voices as they speak

Under breath, beneath his eyes

His sight, the razorblades on his hands

Fire! From a lighter

He lights the torch and the flame dances

Onto the blades, silver threats of harming

Curse words do some bombing

On my ears

Whispers of fear

“just don’t do nothing motherfucker, hold still”

Next stops comes up and the bodies move (joder!)

In and out as rule

But those coming in have no clue

Of the danger that he brews

Some of us are frozen in

As we stay within

“He’ll do nothing, just don’t look at him”

His eyes are set

On the razorblades that he creates

With a darkened tip and a melted grip

He handles the handle as if his hand was made of candles

A slip and a grip, I giggle, what a trip

The Razorblades fly underneath the chairs

And the old lady grips her purse

Drumming chest now want to come out

But this moving train is a death box of steel

Heed word of this my young fiends

“Don’t look at him and he’ll do no thing”

He’s now dormant

Not looking at the blades

Nor to the creases on his hand

They just lie there on his palm

Waiting for action, for a reaction

But of his rotten mind there’s only a fraction

There’s no longer any attraction

For the blood, it could pour

Only he gloats, of how this wagon to him is tuned

The razorblades no longer fly

He sits there and to his will they’re all trapped

To this vagabond with no mind

My brain finds strength /its time to flee

This dead box of steel

Doors open wide, to the sides

Only a trigger

I moved away from the right

And onto the left, to his side

My left hand as I left the cart

Grazed his shoulder and his mind

“Have fun, Eugene”

I utter and he smiles

Out ahead the platform lies

My feet on it I set to

stir away the shame and wave goodbye

And if that train was no train

But a supermarket

On this parade there’d be no rain

This’d be no news target

Only a megaphone would command thee

Clean up on aisle 3

Goliath

He came into this world weighting 14 pounds, measuring about 24 inches. They said that when he came out from between the legs of his mother, a woman that did not measure a centimeter above 4 feet, the doctor said with horror that he looked like a heavy ball of coal. Upon laying eyes on him his father, that had planned to call him after his own father, was left speechless. He then reached out to a bible he had taken with him to bless his child, and decided to call him the first name he'd find. Randomly flicking the pages he encountered "David" but stayed muted. Instead, without raising his eyes, he loudly said "Goliath" to the nurse.

As a child, when his family sat around the television in the living room, he would sit in a corner and get lost in the shadows. His formative years were not the best. Standing a whole foot above his classmates many epithets were screamed mocking his gargantuan body. In order to fit in, he attempted to hunch his body to the size of those around him. The results were for the worse, his body kept growing at an alarming rate, and then he was not only of enormous size, but the hunch on this back was nearly the size of another child. A normal one.

Some say he never quite grew up. While his body kept stretching to the heavens, in his eyes it could still be found the soul of a child. It is speculated that so is the reason why his voice never developed, it remained effeminate, with sudden breaks into higher notes, until the day he ceased to be. By the time he was 24 he decided to stop speaking. A couple of years before he had managed to quit hearing. The words that made reference to his monstrosity where now an unrecognizable whispers. Eventually he even stopped responding to his own name.

He first got involved in a fist fight early in His adulthood. Prior to that event no living member of the creation had attempted to get physically involved with Him. Sitting in a bar stall, a stranger tried to sit on His lap. The man claimed to had not seen Him, but as the room filled with laughter, His fists made an appearance. After that, people made a conscious attempt to no longer direct words towards the creature. In fact, as He carried His weight down the streets, people would avert their eyes and pretend to not see Him.

It was a June 7th, on His mother's birthday, that He finally lost His family. As they gathered around the dining room table to sing, His mother insisted that they wait on him. The creature sat still on His favorite chair right beside the table. A wooden chair that underneath Him looked as if it was made for a child but that happened to be of a normal size. After His family waited for hours for His arrival, they sang and left.

It was exactly 2 weeks after that, when He first encountered a mirror in His adult life, that He noticed the faded color on His skin. He no longer looked like coal, but like burned coal. The image that the mirror showed made Him for the first time in years say His own name. He did not speak it, but screamed in such terrifying manner, that parts of the roof of the house collapsed over its power. The people in the house woke up afraid, and as the eldest of the brothers started checking the rooms of their home he encounter the lifeless carcass of his mother under a solid piece of concrete.

Whether it was caused by the image He saw on the mirror, or the one on the living room floor, it is not known, what is known is that armed with a machete He exited the house uttering words no one could comprehend. The movements from the arms and legs were disjointed and uneven. There was no sense or rhythm, but as His feet moved recklessly about the street a police car appeared at the scene. The lone officer, David Martinez, was a rookie 6 months out of the academy. His small and fragile body covered in his pale skin gave him the appearance of a dead man. As the creature approached him, moving as a furious shadow, the terrified young man raised his gun and with shaking hands pulled the trigger. It lit on fire and the people on the street gathered around It as if It was something they had encountered for the first time in their lives.

The young man collapsed after the encounter. He woke about a week later in a mental institution, and later hung himself from his balcony with his black shoe laces. It is said that in his final days, he whispered the name of the creature under his breath, wide eyed into a mirror.

The Girly Girl

Cold late noon, between bursts of rain. By now, the ache the drop in temperature brings to my fingers is something I'm used to. I walk across the not so empty hall, unaware. Unaware of the faces and the sounds, ignoring the signs of life about me, as I learned to do at an early age. People never mean that much, they never last. The faces and names escape my memory just as quickly as it takes for them to make acquaintance. All there is to me is the gray concrete wall to my left and the trees to my right. And the cold.

A calling sound makes its way through the hall and I ignore it because I refuse to be the kind of girl that responds to anything that is not her name. However, I know that whomever is calling, is calling to me. What is worse, I know exactly who is it that is calling. My pace remains unchanged, as does my demeanor, but inside a hope builds. The hope that he will catch up with me. I sneak a look right, towards the trees, just so that the corner of my eye can see the gray shirt approaching me. I hear hurried steps. I take a detour left, because I like getting in my own way, and feel myself clear of danger. But fate has a funny way of messing with me because the hurried steps still approach me. I again look right, this time to the propaganda on the wall, and once again the corner of my eye sees the gray shirt, now imminent upon me.

A tap on my right shoulder leads me to turn to that side, only to find the propaganda. But my instincts, betraying my reason, make my body turn left to find him there, in his gray shirt, right beside me. He carries two smiles, one on his mouth and the other on his eyes, and I'm not quite sure which one blinds more.  Out of my lips rushed a high pitched sound that to me resembled a "Hi!", but I'm not certain. If it was a hi, then it was the most honest hi I ever delivered, one I didn't have the time to process through my channels of control, to tone down my emotion. It was in that instant, in that very moment, in every emotion the "Hi!" carried that she made her presence felt. The girly girl.

The conversation that followed as we walked beside each other is a blur, an unimportant blur, because before and after it, he was and still remains a stranger. A stranger with no prospect of ever becoming anything more, anything different from a stranger. At least not if I can help it. But at this moment in time, it is him being a stranger what makes him so important, so dangerous. She will make up stories, create all sorts of fictions about who he is. This stranger, that could be the most fetid piece of faeces there ever was, she can make out to be whomever she wants him to be. All she could ever need in a man manifested itself in the eyes of this man she barely knows. To her, he is possibilities. Of that, she is unafraid, she is eager to explore. She, who once drank a glass of rum as a dare and felt proud as her sweaty body shook, crumbled in a chair while the screams of her burned throat embraced the heat. Whether he is an instant of happiness followed by heart break, or someone waiting to reject her, she does not care. She is not afraid.

She is not me. I preferred the moment that followed goodbye because each of us walking away was the only thing that made sense to me. There is no point in wasting time on strangers. There is no point in beginning things that I know exactly how they'll end.

She holds on to the moment of hi and sometimes when I render power, mostly in my sleep, she awakens the feeling of the moment asking me for more. For her, life lies in those ephemeral moments, the ones where we forget who we are supposed to be. The moments in which I stop (or start) being me.

Me? I'm walking out of the hall and to the train station, because I can see the gray clouds and there is no way I'm going to be caught under the rain.