Monday, May 31, 2010

Shuddering in the Last Seat on the Left.

Train- 259 Words
Stephen N. Dethrage

The immense steel millipede of modern man crawls along its set path, and in its fifth car, in the last seat on the left, I shudder. Too many things are moving at once. Pistons, cylinders, rods, eight wheels per car, too many cars to count... it's unsettling. Any malfunction is catastrophe, and there are simply too many chances for malfunction. Still, I reasoned that the train would be safer than trying to fly, and in this blizzard, my only option was the lesser of two dangers. The countryside around me would be familiar in another season, but in the middle of a Russian winter, everything is blurred to white, slow mile after slow mile, with no gauge of time or distance traveled. I think of my marriage. The landscape of our love changed from bright and vibrant to dull and universally white. The change was slow, but then one day everything was alien, distinctly different than what was before, until at last, the foreign became the norm. In the end, we derailed, divorced. There were too many things moving at once. Critical, crucial things began to crack, and went unnoticed in the blur of everything set in motion. When the crack finally snapped and things broke that we could not love without, there was no repair to be made. We were lost in momentum. You can hardly change a faulty wheel on a moving train. We crashed. A Catastrophe. Too much motion in the cold. In the last seat of the left, in the fifth train car, I shudder.

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