Weekly Writing – May 18 2024

The train had been humming through the night for longer than it felt as if the night should have lasted. Their watch had stopped along with the brass-rimmed clock above the door to the next carriage, at a precise, unremarkable 10:47 in the evening; perhaps the sun, the greatest clock, had as well.
But there had been that flash outside the train’s windows. It had woken them from their nodding half-doze against the glass, one cresting amber second of light beyond the cliffs that held the valley in their teeth. They had waited for the delayed rumble of a sound, an explosion coming the other way down the tracks, but the night had remained silkily silent beyond the thrumming shuttle of the train stitching through it.
It had been long enough since then for them to grow hungry. Long enough for them to check most of the other carriages and find only silence inside. They had no excuse left for not checking the locomotive.
They couldn’t ever have wiled away enough time in the other carriages to avoid it, maybe. Not if time wasn’t what the train was moving through anymore. But if it had been terrible to stare down carriage after carriage at all the empty benches, no sign left behind that anyone had ever been there, how would it feel to look for the people who should always know what was going on with the train and find no one?
They knew no more about its mechanisms than they did those of the sun, ultimately. How to stop it, how to change its course, if there was anywhere to change to. Anywhere to go.
There had to be. But if there wasn’t, they wouldn’t have to know, wouldn’t have to know they were doomed, until they opened the door beneath that clock and saw what was behind it. If they had somehow run out of time, not out of it like a resource but out of it like a maze, then it couldn’t make any difference if they stood there a little longer, could it?