Tag: trains

In my dream it’s moon-y and iridescent—it’s night, and every leaf wears a dull shine, as if dipped in motor oil—and a train is cranking up the street outside my childhood home. It leans into a neighbor’s yard and snakes around their immaculate little cottage of vinyl siding belching smoke, which catches like trashed plastic grocery bags in the branches of a yew tree. Then it reappears, seems to reassemble itself, on the other side and ambles back onto the pavement, this time in the direction of my window. I watch it hop the curb into the dark green, almost-blue grass pushing it into the loam in big, black streaks. My father is going to be livid. I trace it past my mother’s rhododendrons and watch its gleaming hulk vanish inexplicably into a slit in the fence. And then I wake up.