from Distant Train

Part One: Celebration The Children

While the fading autumn sun cruised toward the horizon, the young boys headed home from in front of the twenty houses—or, to be more precise, from in front of the tin shacks that formed the entrance to each of the twenty houses. As they had been doing throughout that summer, they left their marbles and spinning tops, unable to stay outdoors any later.

That summer they had not stayed out under the moonlight or enjoyed the glow that spread glistening over the lake in front of them. The moon’s glow bounced over and around stalks of cattails and made them look like shining spears. The children did not see the moonlight as it lay down across the wide empty earth in front of the coops and off to their left, exposing its resilient face and offering them comfort and reassurance. As it moved, it glided to their right toward the expansive desert, until it became invisible upon reaching the horizon. The darkness played a game of fright and intimidation with their young hearts, which yearned for that moonlight. Under its glow they would chase each other to the train station behind the twenty houses. Without the light the train station seemed like a ghost, the switch house like the sea’s surface on a cloud-filled night: black, menacing. The same was true of the light poles mounted all along the railway stretching from east to west, or the thick telephone polls. Both without moonlight were like demons and evil spirits.

They were not used to seeing anything at night without the moon’s glow. But this past summer the children didn’t play their usual games. They did not go hedgehog hunting under the railways or fish for the beautiful freshwater bass. The boys’ wet dreams, their adolescent bucking and spinning under their sheets, stopped. The nocturnal jinn of the sea did not visit. The birds did not fly in from the west. The bird traps were not even set.

All that was left were perpetual marbles and tops until nightfall. In the game of marbles they hovered over a small patch of dirt unaware of the rest of the earth or sky around them. They let their tops collide and spin on the ground at first. Then one of the boys would raise it up to the palm of his hand through a sensitive movement of his middle and index fingers. The top spun on his palm and his gaze locked onto it until his eyes spun with it, his head spun with it, time itself spun until everyone was shocked that summer had gone without ever really coming. And they asked one another when the train would come and “calm their fears,” as the adults put it.

The sun did not set; it just fell in the west and died. Darkness dropped like lead over the landscape. The moon sunk into the pit of the lake’s waters. Each mother spontaneously told her child, “Go to sleep at sundown, or the lake water will empty out on us and flood up to our doorways.”

Then one night, as the children were just starting to retreat indoors, something strange happened. They found their mothers coming out to join them.