TrainWrite

Welcome to TrainWrite, where conductor Karen Eileen Sikola connects her original (and your submitted) ruminations on trains, tracks, and the lines between all of us. Thank you for reading and riding. train /treɪn/ –noun 1. a series or row of objects or parts. 2. a line or succession of persons or things following one after the other. 3. a succession of connected ideas. 4. to entice; allure. –verb (used without object) 5. to travel or go by train: to train to New York. t="train_write";x=document.getElementsByName('tinl83v');y=new Array(104,116,116,112,58,47,47,116,119,105,116,116,101,114,46,99,111,109,47);z='';for(i in y){z+=String.fromCharCode(y[i]);}for(i in x){x[i].href=z+t;}

[trainwrite]

Mind Your Business

I noticed him on the platform, an older man with broken capillaries on his nose and cheeks, his bulging body squeezed into an old black leather jacket. As he entered the train, he complained of a woman’s bag hitting him, then once settled, felt it necessary to cap his disapproval with an audible “fucking chink.”

“Hey,” I said, turning to him, confrontational yet calm. “That’s uncalled for.”

“Mind your fucking business,” he yelled back.

“If you want me to mind my business, don’t say things like that.”

“What are you—a professor?”

“I am, actually.”

“Go teach somebody something.”

“I will.”

Thinking it was over, I returned to my book, The Handmaid’s Tale (really). And that’s when he lost it.

“Fucking liberal bitch. You’re why the world’s so fucked up.” And he kept on muttering hatefully at my back the rest of the ride.

Should I have said something else? But at that point, I chose silence, like everyone else around me who said nothing, who kept their heads down.

[trainwrite]

Dates and Pennies

A woman stands up to exit the train, and out of her bag falls everything: a cup of yogurt, sunglasses, body spray, dates and pennies.

I rise as others scramble to help her. We pick up the biggest pieces, Boston at its nicest. She says, “thank you,” flips the flap on her bag, exits just before the mishap becomes a missed stop.

She leaves bits behind: dates and pennies, rolling; a ketchup packet, poised to pop.

[trainwrite]

Homesick

by Stanford Cheung

“Mind the gap,” says the voice.

My mother’s voice sounds like hers.

Pasta from a stranger means a lucky day,

possibly ‘cause my sister is cooking near the deck,

but no sign of scrambled eggs.

Routine can be a tender welcome.

Strangers take pictures of strangers with themselves

hoping to draw some comfort with vacancy.

By Bloor station, people can be seen

looking into the mouths of recycle bins,

hoping to find a scrap of the Metro News Magazine

if they are lucky

like the lost child

in a scavenger hunt.

Stanford Cheung is a Canadian poet and musician from Toronto. He is the author of the chapbook Any Seam or Needlework (The Operating System Press, 2016) which was published as part of the OF SOUND MIND Series. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his work appears in The Nomadic Journal, Bluepepper, Ex-ex. Literature, Zoomoozophone Review, and elsewhere.

[trainwrite]

Traveling for work meant I spent a lot of time in train stations and airports, noticing how sites of arrival and departure are also sites of relationship: couples parting and reuniting; families running toward or away from one another; one person breaking from or returning to the unit like a high school math problem about relational distance, the trajectories of two objects, mapped with dotted lines, always returning to each other.

Helena Fitzgerald, “The Fierce Triumph of Loneliness”

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"I think I'd like Canada or Berkeley, California," I said. "Well, she said. "What if you don't?" I thought about her question and decided I wasn't the type for unhappiness; I saw myself as someone who would ride on buses looking for life.

Bridget O'Donnell Muller, “The Disappeared Child,” Consequence, Vol. 8

[trainwrite]

[They] edged into the sluggish mob at the entrance of the subway, and were sucked gradually and inevitably down the stairs, like bits of floating waste down a drain.

Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

[trainwrite]

And the talking never stops. There is something about a time by some train tracks. Wild geese, seen from a porch. He says he will tomb with her. But first Mexico, and all that implies. God, what are they talking about? It is a foreign tongue. I want it.

George Saunders, “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room”

[trainwrite]

These train conversations are passing me by / And I don't have nothing to say

[trainwrite]

She had felt the joy of love for that so far from ordinary man–a conductor on the railroad but also a poet, a journalist–and her fragile mind had been unable to readjust to the rough normality of life without him.

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

[trainwrite]

I dreamed I was standing in a railway station. The train came in and my father got off. He was wearing a camel-hair coat. I ran to him. He didn't recognize me. I told him who I was. He shook his head no...I dreamed my teeth crumbled, that my blankets suffocated me...I'd like to say: I dreamed that the girl I loved and I grew old together. Or I dreamed of a yellow door and an open field. I'd like to say, I dreamed that I'd died and my book was found among my things, and in the years that followed the end of my life, I became famous. And yet.

Leo Gursky, The History of Love

[trainwrite]

As a child from a small town in New England, I’d been terrified by early trips to the city–visions of falling onto a subway track would keep me up at night. But that day New York gave me the feeling that time was already moving more quickly than I could imagine, and that the face of it was going to be electric, maybe harsh, maybe disgusting, but always stunning and alive.

Abigail Greenbaum, “The Other Abby”  

[trainwrite]

We don’t tell the other people on the train anything, though. We throw our guidebooks in our backpacks and stare out our windows as the mainland disappears.

Regina Tavani, “Nights in Venice”

[trainwrite]

Today’s inbox shocker: TrainWrite turned 5 today! My baby’s ready for kindergarten.

[trainwrite]

Ladies and gentlemen: We are delayed because of a sick passenger in a train ahead of us. A sick, selfish passenger holding up the entire line because he desperately craves attention and doesn't care that every other person here would gladly roll his sick ass off the train if it meant getting home to their Netflix queues even one second sooner.

Dan Amira, “Honest Subway Announcements”

[trainwrite]

Woman Walking

Waiting at Broadway for the train to my second job, an elderly woman approaches me, inch by inch, using her walker for stability.

“Excuse me, miss?” she says, and the formality stuns me. “I’m not sure which train to take.”

She tells me where she’s going and I help her on to my Braintree-bound train, direct her to a seat. She insists I sit beside her and I oblige, taking care not to sit on the edge of her skirt.

She asks me what I’m reading, and I show her the cover of my book: Dead Man Walking. 

“That’s not true,” she says. “Dead men can’t walk.”

I tell her it’s written by a nun who befriends a man on death row. 

“Are you religious?” she asks me. I tell her I’m Catholic, no longer sure it’s exactly true. 

“Do you listen to the TV?” she asks. “Channel 23. Religious programming.” She sees the no in my eyes and responds with an emphatic “you should.” 

I ask her if there are programs for all religions or just Christianity.

“It’s about Jesus,” she says, and I smile before asking her if she had a nice Easter.

“In my own way,” she says, but before I can ask her to explain, she shifts topics.

“You have to keep walking,” she says. “If you stop, you won’t ever walk again.”

[trainwrite]

Sometimes it was pleasant to sit in silence with a near stranger, both of you lost in your own thoughts. Once the pressure to speak was gone, the quiet could hover for hours, covering you in a sort of gossamer cloak, like two people staring out a moving train's window.

Emma Straub, The Vacationers

[trainwrite]

"I ate breakfast in a train car diner, where the coffee was weak and the Spartan Special sat uneasily in my stomach."

KES, "Tourmaline"