And this week's special is...oddly surrealistic french yaoi?
The train was already moving when I stepped aboard.
I had not meant to leave Paris, not that morning. The letter had arrived folded so many times it threatened to tear, summoning Gauvain to his father’s reading. He had invited me without speaking it aloud, like he knew I would follow him to the edge of the world. I didn't dare prove him wrong.
The station dissolved behind us. Streetlamps melted into elongated streaks of rain and steel. The rails hummed beneath our feet, vibrating through me, through him, threading us into the carriage.
Inside, everything was glass.
Bottles rattled in wire racks, some rolling free and leaving glistening trails that caught the light. Windows fractured our reflections into impossible multiplicities, screens glowing faintly like captured fragments of thought. Strangers’ eyes held motion as if the carriage had absorbed it and replayed it in quiet pulses. The train moved at a pitch that taught glass how to bear weight, bend without shattering, to hold tension as if it were its own. I watched Gauvain’s hands rest lightly on the rail, absorbing sway, commanding the motion as though it had been waiting for him.
He swallowed pills without water. I swallowed a memory and it lodged. Our faces collided in a reflection, flickering together. All our letters, laughs, small betrayals, confessions folded into that moment. Something lodged in my chest, luminous and insistent. My fingers twitched toward his arm, brushing air, never enough. He noticed them anyway.
The train curved. Memories leaked through the windows. Outside, rooms refused burial: curtains breathed, glasses tipped, filled with something sharp left too long. The taste arrived intact and left unfinished. I leaned toward him. He leaned with me. Our shoulders did not touch, but in the sway, we oscillated together, a single rhythm threaded through the carriage.
A man whispered about guilt nearby, cataloging offenses like minutes: choosing, wanting, enduring incorrectly. He stopped mid-sentence. Silence stretched. We leaned toward one another, smiling, and the space between us became language, precise and undeniable.
The bar car appeared as if drawn from the air itself. Bottles righted themselves. Another bore a healed fracture, resin yellowed, bending light across Gauvain’s reflection and mine, folding us into a geometry that could not exist anywhere but here.
Tunnels swallowed the train. Darkness compressed the carriage, squeezing it. Colors asserted themselves in acidic flashes. Seats leaned toward us. The aisle narrowed. Every step became negotiation with motion. Every breath a shared wish. The train moved as if alive, and we moved through it, attuned to every pulse, every tremor.
A low harmonic threaded through racks, frames, teeth. Fractures bloomed across a window with patient precision. Watching became a contract. Every pulse, every vibration, every tremor spoke in syntax we read without naming.
It folded inward, precise. Liquid spread across the floor, reflective and numbing. I traced a name through it with a finger. Gauvain mirrored the motion, hovering, separated only by breath. The floor accepted the remainder. Distance quivered. In that quiver, we existed. Luminous. Aligned.
The train slowed. Metal shrieked. Bottles tipped. Windows held. Every resonance was a heartbeat. Every vibration threaded through both of us.
No station. Only white, endless and clinical, vibrating with impossible angles. Wind entered carrying rain, old paper, disinfectant. It pressed into the carriage as if weighing it, folding it, testing every motion.
The train regained speed. Cracks widened, then arrested. Light settled into lattices that could hold. Every shard, every reflection, every vibration hummed in accord with the carriage. Silence followed. Not relief. Not recognition. Only certainty, a weight pressed into the world itself.
The bar car vanished. The man who whispered about guilt was gone. A book lay open on a page no one remembered turning. I tucked a shard of glass into my palm, still warm. Gauvain’s hand rested near my shoulder, thighs aligned without touching. Warmth transmitted anyway. Electric. Precise. Anchored.
Outside, daylight fractured across rails and windows. The train did not announce the next stop.
And everything clicked into place.
