badsleepwell

I'm standing on a platform of strangers in an unfamiliar town watching the train start to pull away from the station with all my friends aboard, shouting bon voyages and hanging out the windows tears fly from faces as the thing picks up speed hankies swiffer back to me a dusk my nose with familiar sense casual conversations and laughter beer sweat and cigaret diner dish and dirty looks shouting smiling kissing crying until their arms are spindly spinarets wavering in heat and then nothing and then the sound of the clacketty clack tracks too is gone down the hole in my head...ALL IS QUIET...The platform is empty now littered with a thousand hundred torn ticket stubs and photos arm in arm bleary eyed good times caught naked in a flashbulb thousand moments in succession likethe click blink click of the shutter eye passing by the station house I notice the a flicker whisper candlelight. The doors are locked and darkness deep but cupping hands to glass eyesquinted within and couldiscern brother sisters and parents aunts uncles and cousins parents parents and godparents all stolid statuesque holding hands eyes closed unstaring swaying not one bit, breathing not one tittle. Startled, I turnt away and came face to face with my onyx skinned complexion reflection in the oily black chassis of a tremendous locomotive. It was too big for the tracks and had swallowed fully half the platofrm whole and silent. With each treackle of blick smoke that bled from the smokestack there was a sensation that the thing itself was breathing, track and rail snapping beneath it like ribs to jack boots.
The photographs and ticket stubs had all become tiny pyres, burning with smogish curls of bitter smoke and ghostly blue flames arranged in an untidy arc leading to the steps to the passenger car that wis shackled to the beast. Those steps were like breathsimple unthinking and as my toes touched the first rung a belch of flame and coalsmoke and the thing lurched forth with sickening speed...In the car it was hush like a fresh snow fall yellow like dawn through sleep crusted eyesoft unfocused the seats were upholstered in cracked leather except for one by the window was done up in my skiin with birthmarks and scars and all. Shuddery stutters uppin dawn my spine. Outside the window countryside puree...but the longer eye stare shapes beggin to drift from the ether...