Whomsoever Rides the Train

You’ll feel the train coming before you hear it. You’ll hear it before you see it. You’ll see the metal tracks beyond it illuminated by its headlamps before you see the train itself. Then you’ll see the train. It comes round the bend. Electric, it sends shocks of light up into the air underneath its skates, as it bears to stop, so eager to continue, to arrive at Southport, Fullerton, the others. The stops aren’t its many homes; they are its numbered haunts, and it patrols them like the night watchman. It makes the noises of motion and nothing else. Except once, below the cranks, my ear pressed to a wooden plank, I heard it let a simple gasp, and then a recovering cough.