I have spent my entire life on trains. I’m not sure if it’s a life or an afterlife, because I never seem to get anywhere and nobody seems to notice me. I have no home, no money, and only one outfit. I’ve never used a private bathroom. I don’t remember my childhood or if I was ever any younger than I am now. I don’t think I have ever given birth to any children myself. I would probably remember that if it had happened.

The trains come and go at a convenient speed for me to avoid getting caught. Here’s how it works: after getting off the last train, I dart about the station, staying in the shadows and back hallways, and occasionally stealing food and water from the little shops lit with yellow lights. When the next train comes, I stay hidden in the crowd until the train starts to pull away. Then I run and leap up onto one of the open cars. There are only ever two kinds of cars on trains: closed cars, for people with fancy tickets, and open cars, which are just platforms of seats open to the wind and rain. The ticket collector never checks the open cars. I know I have to keep moving to keep ahead of the people who are chasing me. I’m not sure why they are chasing me but I know if they ever catch up, I might end up on the tracks.

The first time I see Steven it is a cloudy day with bright light pouring through the glass dome that forms the roof of this station. I leap onto an open car and turn and see someone as bedraggled as myself, except handsome instead of beautiful. He seems to know we are the same and looks surprised.

“Who are you?” he says.

“I tell people my name is Sandy but I don’t really know what it is,” I say.

“Steven,” he says. He has sharp eyes, the kind that don’t miss much, and a mouth that looks like it’s smiling at the world—with mockery or amusement or both.

That is it. The station where I leave Steven is a dim one—too few windows, too many people, all of them smelly and wearing long coats. At that dim station, I get off and he stays on and I think I will never see him again except in my mind several times a day when I wonder what he is doing and then why I can’t stop thinking about him.

The second time I see Steven, the chasers are close behind me. I hear their shouts and the barks of their dogs. I leap off the wood-slat platform and into an open car with white plastic seats. Sweat pours off my brow but now the train is accelerating too quickly for the chasers to get me and I watch them recede into the distance, standing angry at the station as I escape for the hundredth or thousandth time.

I pull myself into the seat to catch my breath.

“You again.”

I turn around and Steven is sitting right behind me. He is wearing the same outfit, same as mine: brown shirt, brown pants, and brown leather jacket with a little bit of filling. Everyone in the open cars wears brown but Steven is the first person who’s ever talked to me.

“Maybe we’re sharing the same dream,” he says. “Or maybe we’re sharing the same hell.”

I climb over my row of seats to sit down next to him. It’s cold outside and he puts his arm around me. I enjoy the warmth. I’m always cold these days. I wish I had one of those beaded outfits that I see the ladies wearing in the stations sometimes. They’re glorious silk dresses with embroidery and long trains and millions of glass beads sewn on in patterns. They must weigh a ton. All of them come with chandelier hats, where a central post supports a chandelier that dangles over the wearer’s head, colorful beads glinting in the light.  The only problem is that the chandelier hats are screwed straight in to the bones of the skull so they can never be removed, and the dresses are sewn into the skin as well. I like sleeping at night without anything stuck to my head and I like to be able to take my clothes off but I still wish someday I could try one of the red and gold dresses with velvet layers and long sleeves—if there were a way to get rid of it afterwards.

I tell all of this to Steven and he says, “You don’t want to be like the crowds. They’re beyond us. They don’t even remember how to speak. I think if we find the right station, we’ll remember who we are.”

 “Is that what you’re doing?” I say. “Searching for the right station?”

He pulls out a napkin. I recognize the logo on it. It’s from one of the sandwich shops. On the napkin is a list of names. “These are all the stations I’ve visited. I never go back to the same station twice. I keep south and figure if I always go the same direction I’ll either have to end up somewhere new or back where I started.”

I squint at Steven. He smells of nutmeg and I suddenly remember standing with him in a kitchen and there are pumpkin pies in the oven and the sound of a child laughing.

“We have a daughter,” I say. As soon as the words come out of my mouth, I know they are true.

Again, Steven looks at me with the same surprise he wore when he first saw me.

Panic floods my entire body. Where is my daughter? There is nothing more important than finding her. But somehow, I know, she’s far away—not in this world, not in this universe. We are in separate glass baubles hanging on some cosmic Christmas tree. Christmas—that’s something else I remember.

“You used to play soccer,” Steven says.

As he says it, I see a soccer ball flying through the air towards me.

We’re at the next station already. The countryside sailing by has been replaced by a station with red columns and hanging banners. The chasers are already upon me. They’re in the same train car as I am, which is a first. They’ve never been this close to me before. As I run away, tears stream down my face, because I have lost something, and when I glance backwards through the crowd, I see the train carrying Steven away. Tears are on his face too, as he writes the name of the red-columned station on his napkin and holds it up to me.

Now I wander through the red-columned station for days. I watch the trains come and go. I wonder where the chasers are. The horrible thought strikes me that maybe they were after Steven all this time and not me, and if that is true, it means they probably got him—right?

I study the crowds more carefully now and realize they are all puppets. Their strings hang from the clouds and they move with vacant smiles and stiff hands, eating like machines, never speaking. There are no children anywhere. I take a closer look at the ladies in the beaded dresses and realize that the dresses are holding the ladies together. The ladies are made of so many disparate parts, and the seams that bind the dresses to the skin are actually binding the skin together too. I don’t want to fall apart like that but I feel like I am going to.

It storms. Now that I think about it, the weather has always been cloudy since I arrived. Day and night they are the same clouds, never permitting any blue sky, never releasing any storm—until now. Rain pours out of the sky and patters on the ridged metal roof of the station.

The next train that comes is dilapidated, with rotting wood and no lights on in the closed cars. It smells of mold and decomposing flesh. I leap onto it and head out into the storm.

When I get to the next station, I see that it has been constructed over water, and the sky is weeping into the waves. The rotten train is scaring me so I disembark and wait among many motionless beaded ladies laying in piles. Someone has left them here to grow algae and barnacles. The next train is a standard line. Line Two, I call it, because every car on this train has the number two painted on its side. I get in.

The Line Two train whisks me up on high tracks that pierce the clouds. It is sunny now. I hear someone calling me. They are three or four cars back. I will have to jump between the cars to reach them. “SANDY! SANDY! SANDY!” The cry is repetitive, like a bird’s. I start weaving through the white plastic seats and the wisps of clouds as the sun blinds me, and I jump from one car to the next like a lemur, and then when I see Steven at the very end of the very last car, I sit up.

The metal room around me bends and twists as my eyes focus on separate parts of it in order, not together. Red lights are flashing. An alarm shrieks. I put a hand to my head and feel blood.

Steven is standing over me. I see his uniform. First Officer. “Captain! Our ship’s been hit!”

“Evacuate,” I say.

I make the announcement and enter the command code to open all the escape pod inner doors. Steven and I are the only members of the bridge crew who survived the initial impact. The bridge escape pod has been destroyed, its white plastic seats blown to nothing along with half the bridge. I wasn’t going to leave my ship anyway, but maybe Steven could have.

I hobble over to the translucent yellow force field that’s sealed off the blown-up wall of the bridge from the starlit vacuum of space. Steven is beside me. We don’t have a daughter. I never told him how I felt about him.

I watch the Parrathian ship in front of us fire blue shots at our escape pods to slaughter our technical crew and passengers one by one. The weapons systems are down otherwise I would be giving them every charge we have left.

I turn to Steven. We’ve both seen the missile streaking towards what remains of our ship, roaring silent on a blue ion tail through the emptiness of space to finish us off.

Steven looks at my expression and then gives me a hug that turns into a hold. “Maybe we’ll end up together in the same hell,” he whispers.

“Or the same dream,” I say.

[Featured Image from Unsplash, free to use]