Cat on a Train

Cat on a Train

The mist was stubbornly ignoring gravity, even without any wind to keep it aloft, to impishly snicker its way into one ear hole or the other.  There wasn’t even a fluttering feather wind, the kind that would swirl the tiniest droplets deep into either ear chaotically, no matter which way you turned.  And ticklishly into nostrils.  And blindingly into every blink.  So, so annoying.

But this was worse.  No movement of air at all, no cooling compensation for the moist misery.  This was one long, cloying, lukewarm complaint from nature, passive aggressively letting you come to the miserable awareness that on this of all evenings, you are most not welcome here.

Alfi (without an “e”, thank you very much) rubbed a wrist ineffectually into one eye, then the other, blinking away the night’s tears.  The effort granted him another moment of clarity, a brief window of time to consume space and the light that glistened off the doubly shined rails.  His eyes tracked their precisely engineered flow, the promise of overwhelming power and motion from the periphery of his sight over his left shoulder, the remembered and anticipated weight careening silently into the distant fog in front of him.

The curve of the twin lines gracefully joined several other pairs, each humming to the other of the distant lands they even now rested in, traversed, bisected.  The one further off to his right chuckled ruefully of a chain of cities along the coast, pearls of decadence, flashing lights, and furtive escapes across its path in the darker, more hidden stretches.  Sometimes bodies.  The other, just within sight beyond the rails in front of him, sighed wistfully of gorgeous and meandering mountain climbs, and high plains where strange creatures grazed its banks.

But this one, his track, boasted no such beauty.  He knew exactly where its eternal serpentine tail lay.  Reeking salt flats oozed into ever decomposing bogs.  The mix of their witch’s brew stench polluted the senses far beyond their natural borders, a sickly yellowish tinge to the air for horizons into the mercilessly flat desert.  The mathematical precision of the dual lines was the only good in that desolation, not one rock formation or scurry of life clinging to isolated survival.  Barrenness.  Nothingness.

This was the world Alfi had been reborn into on that fateful first ride on a train.  His only ride.  So far, he thinks, gratefully, as it had almost been his last as well.  He had jumped – fell, collapsed, to be brutally honest – at the start of the one and only bend on this line, not far back from where he now squatted among the scraggly brush.  He had been insensate, aware only of death, and avoided consummating its promise of release by the sheer luck of having last moved until he was near the lip of the flatcar’s right side.

Had he expended his last energy crawling to the opposite edge, inertia would only have rolled his limp near-carcass a mockingly safe distance from the rest of the world.  But death gave him up for another short while, the floppy flesh and bones he had left to him nudged over the end of one world into this one.  The train had slowed enough to make the turn and smash him to the rocks below with indifferent gentleness, but not so slow as to hold him aloft and complete its long attempt at his murder.

He vaguely remembered bits and flashes of his shaky and doubtful recovery.  The alternately bland and severely annoying mist gave life to his feverish blood.  First insects, then rodents, as strange and new as they were, filled his belly as well as any from his past life.  And now, mostly whole, he sat gazing at the Ring barely visible in the obscure distance, where all tracks led.

A train would come soon, the pattern of its scheduled course etched in his bones.  Here, at its slowest, he would regain his journey.  Where that was ahead of him, he had no way of knowing, the grey curtain of the air in the Ring beyond opaque, every train swallowed on its way to the next world.

Muscles twitched along Alfi’s back, anticipation rippling down and along his tail.  His left ear turned outward, attuned to the low hum now singing sweetly from his track.