Weekly Writing – April 1 2023

The final call for boarding. She had told herself she wouldn’t hesitate.
But she’d been imagining the cheery whistle of a steam train, a conductor’s bellow over a bustling platform. Daylight through the station’s high windows, multiplying its population by two, by shadows in a hurry.
She had told herself it would be that easy, brisk and bright and hand over your ticket, when the time came to leave. But no trains like that stopped at Cadwell Station anymore.
Velvet upholstery and gilded locomotives grumbling like tame lions. Even daylight didn’t visit most days – the haze from the gutters turned it back green, stretching the shadows of the orderlies into stretching, stooping skirls of mist, like starving cranes.
They loaded the corpses in silence. The gilding on the locomotive was dull and pitted with what it would drive them through. Out through the haze, to the great fires, maybe, that she had seen as skyward heaps of smoke from her bedroom window ever since her family and neighbours had started dying.
She’d been meant to leave in September, on a train wreathed in steam and gold. A letter of recommendation from her tutor in her pocket, a brand new leather valise swinging at her side, carrying everything in her life that wasn’t waving her goodbye or shining ahead of her. How had it come to the corpse train?
To her crouched there in the shadows, dirty and shaking with hunger and not at all sure she would have the strength to hold onto the train until it burst free of the haze and quarantine? It had been just a few people coughing in the street, a few weeks ago.
The orderlies stood close, winding their shadows together in muttered conversation. Masked and muffled and marked with copper badges on their shoulders, professionally unclean. They started towards the train, which she had watched them fill to bursting over the last four hours, and she crawled at last from her hiding place.
Tucked under a bench at the end of the platform for all those hours, practically buried in the luggage that had been abandoned around it. That weak, gawky crawl was all she could manage first, limbs at angles and odds like the orderlies’ shadows, but the train’s mournful make way wail shoved her to her feet. Frantic, stumbling as it started to grind slowly away from the platform.
No valise. She wouldn’t have been able to carry it with her and run quickly enough to catch the train. Weighed down by her life all packed up in new leather, she wouldn’t have been able to make the leap from the platform, or catch hold, both-handed, of the gilding warped away from the window of the second-to-last car.
She swung against it, checking the last of her momentum into the glass with her shoulder. No letter; she had dressed in as many layers as she could of the cleanest clothes she could find, which were still filthy, but she could at least pass for a beggar in the healthy streets instead of something that had crawled out of the sick ones. No pockets, no recommendation, no tutor, no bright future at the academy.
Just a window stacked with corpses, rictus gapes of agony riding alongside her. And life for her, life, at least, if she could hold on long enough. The haze tore around the train ahead; buried three-deep in masks, she could still smell it.
Corpse-sick green swirling past her, painting lively shadows against the window. She turned away from it, to the familiar streets gone sodden and wailing and empty, rushing by.
Just life. She closed her eyes, her cheek pressed to the cold kiss of the window, the ache of motion swaying already in her weakened limbs, and waited for the train to bring her to it.