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Chapter 1
Charlotte
“Assumption is a privilege.”
I sit still in an otherwise empty wooden train car. I imagine the boxcar to not exist, giving me the sensation of flight and of float. The deflating rubber ducks in a nearly stale and cooling bathwater type of float. I check my body temperature and it is uneven. Cold in the gut, heat in the heart. Repetition is a game the smacking of steel plays against damp tracks. It invades my eardrums. The wetness collects as a product of a lingering mist and a tedious melt.
A hiss of night and clack on top of clack
tells my home I am coming back.
My dingy mattress doesn’t hear un-shined train whistles arriving but that of its owner slowly returning to form.
The
Clink, clank,
clink, clank,
over and over,
delivers a calm towards me, untroubled and sober.
The wooden train is almost prepared to stop.
“Almost” whispers from my breath.
I am a single wing.
A solaced feather on a wing.
A rooted quill of a feather.
A hippie vane of a quill.
The swift barb of a vane.
The lift raises my guts and lowers my stomach. Rocking in the train car, I may as well be on a spaceship. I let my neck ache where it wishes as I yearn for my spaceship again. The sensation is brief but means everything to me now. It returns my body to its surroundings with a new burst of energy. I harness it, store it within me like a piece of gum, saved after a chomp of the sting of a poignant fresh garlic clove, and let it sizzle through my nerves.
I run rough fingertips along the bottom of a damaged wall and push into crevices created by natural knots in the wooden panes. I dig. I dig in this train car. The always-rough tips of my fingers bend, and my never-perfect nails prove they can toughen up more than they already have. The panes play and poke back. Happily accepting its dust, I settle.
Seven gentle knocks against the inner enclosure fill the car with an echo that plays with the clink, clank and continues its bounce like a kitten chasing its tail. Meow. How I miss the freedom in chasing my tail as a private experience.
The empty train car allows me to regenerate. My body can produce, filter, and recognize more energy than the average Being. A gift and a burden that often leaves my shoulders uneven, and a tightness between my blades I let stir me. Storage in my spine. Fragile hairs lift off my arm as they reach for the clouds wandering above. Their desire to brush them will have to wait. A wait I have come to sympathize with.
There is a vibration that exists that runs through life. I am a vessel aiming to once again tap into that force with an intensity I once possessed. Possessed as the White Cat and young charlotte so freely.
My experiences as a Traveler has taught me there are spaces that exist, even in this realm, that encourage connection to other Verses. Gateways of sorts, but through my body and mind. No time machine required. Something has not quite been the same. A something yet to be placed. This something has been keeping me from tuning in to higher frequencies, to make the travel I crave so deeply.
This energy regeneration is not quite the superhero status one might imagine. It is, however, a useful tool that feels like a curse when I am stagnant but a gift when it comes to traveling.
Words escape between my lips into the cooling air in the form of fog.
“How I miss the traveling.”
Sitting in this space, this space that is a part of what awaits me outside that splintered door today, is attacking this collective energy to the point of my exhaustion. I am the deflated rubber duck. I can only store and give away what I can. I am not quite empty enough to act out in desperation.
I am a vagrant with little possessions, yet I still possess a slyness. All train-hopping vagrants do. The slyness of a fox and a trust in others not paying attention. The conductor looking at the pretty ladies. The ticket puncher checking his phone for the Red Sox score.
Red Sox win!
Red Sox win!
Distracted ignorant allies perfectly content with that ignorance. I do not blame them one bit as there is a peculiar peace found in it. A part of me even holds a vile of jealousy for the carefree.
This space does not allow me to do their job and mine simultaneously. To avoid detection is to hide in plain sight. Be dirty. Be ugly. That is where my beautiful slyness resides.
A sharp pain stabs at my heart like a needlepoint brushing thin skin. I know this is my stop before a heavy whistle sounds into the brisk winter air. I sense snowflakes aching to shower the already frosting grounds. I do have a soft spot for snowflakes. I appreciate their brevity and bravery. I heard the flakes crying out for contact with Beings starting a few miles back. The task of melting is heavier than it seems. The heels of my tired feet sound hollow from the jump down off the tracks. A thud announces me as blood rushes up and then descends my arches to come alive.
I let the spike of my own pain sting me. With head bowed, I hide my eyes with a dingy green hoodie as worn as my energy has become over the course of my current journey. I stay there until the sting of my heels disappear into the night along with the train’s whistle.
After the pause, camouflaged by the bushes, I work to sense any Phantoms lurking and come to terms with the fact that I am not being watched. They cannot touch me in this space many of us Travelers have dubbed the Space Dominated by the Illusion of Time, but they can still observe and see the fruits of their influence. The paranoia of my identity being discovered lurks my actions here, and even more so when I find myself present in my dream space.
My blood settles as I turn towards a stranger.
An awaiting stranger.
I stare at him until I get a startled response. His shoulders jump mildly as he straightens his spine in embarrassment. The movement tells me this lone man has missed his ride on purpose. He is in no hurry to return home.
I remain silent. I always prefer for them to verbally initiate the conversation. It gives them a sense of control. He does not know how familiar he is to me already. Never a stranger for too long if there is a beat in the heart I may touch.
Sitting on a stone bench I am almost certain is adding to his chill, his bicuspids are busy chatting with one another. I listen to what his body is sharing
Clitter, clatter.
I can feel what is the matter.
At first, he looks away. They often do. When his gaze returns, he hesitates and then summons dialog. I imagine his hands gesturing me forward. This is what he wants from me. The chatter of his teeth subsides, making way for the real conversation.
“Are you okay, miss?”
I am not a miss.
“Ma’am?”
He assumes I need help. That my filthy appearance invites a welcomed sympathy. Looking over the fades and holes of my hoodie, he displays a frown meant to pity. His baggy eyes say:
poor, poor creature
I feel an urge to poke the bags of his eyes for fun but remember that may be inappropriate to the cultures residing in this space. Most of them, actually.
The lone stranger assumes that my tangled mess of hair means I need fixing. That I have no home to call my own. He assumes I need rescuing because he thinks I am alone.
I am not alone, and I am definitely not a ma’am.
Rudeness raises red flags half-mast and I can’t take any chances. So I respond with sweetness and soft words in his native language. He is asking because he does not wish to answer for himself.
“Are you, yourself, okay sir?”
Puffed out eyes widen, thinning out the plushy purple-ness of his skin and dart down to the ground. I can feel the veins of his face canaling blood in a rush to somewhere they will never have the gift of stopping. The corner of his mouth again points down with his sight. In this reaction, we both know he is not truly okay. Catching himself, he perks up and brings those same corners back to a defensive default of a position.
A smile half-baked to cookie dough, he responds,
“Yes, I am fine.”
There it is. The lie.
The lie he is working so hard to believe. Many Beings lie through storytelling. Especially the stories relayed with the most ease. Some narratives have even been told so convincingly in repetition they have transformed to some form of truth to the storyteller. This space I reside in has normalized it to a point where it is quite natural. The most honest of Beings will agree.
I let the lie hit me. The sharpness in my chest deepens with a ripping sound within me. I hear it in my chamber of a skull and it too slithers slowly above my left ear. I adjust my cream-colored Oshkosh bandana to hide anything that may appear abnormal to him. I choose to open my heart and let him in.
Bracing myself, a tidal wave of hurt shuffles into me. My system is flush with new aches that pinball off my organs. Riptides of pain crash my ribcage and swirl between my vitals. The hurt is his, not mine, but it is ours. His heart has been attacked, not quite cracked, but his wound is recent.
Snowflakes break free of the chalky clouds above, and cannot wait to dust. I stop to appreciate the uniqueness of these snowflakes. Passionate, purposeful, and determined snowflakes. The first that jump out of the gate race to land on the tip of his nose, already rosy and crooked, to paint it with a trace of form, to meet his heat and drip slowly onto the ground. He wipes his face with his handkerchief, dried snot and all. I do not judge. I sense his unnecessary embarrassment. I hold his eyes to mine. He is captured in an intimacy he is not accustomed to. Pupils dilate, and his vulnerability shows he is now ready to listen.
Mumbling just enough that I am clear, I speak,
“I am sorry for your loss.”
He detects my accent. An accent I absorbed and adopted when I crashed down in this space some call Poland when I was a kitten child. Has to be a good ten years ago in this realm. Here, in the Space Dominated by the Illusion of Time,I am what Beings see as a seventeen-year-old girl. A weak, pathetic seventeen-year-old girl. There is no right or wrong to it.
His eyes are large and wider than galaxy belts, even though his brow serves as a canopy for them. I won’t share which galaxy exactly, but you get the idea. With the deepening wrinkles on his shiny forehead and his words, he asks, “What?”
My voice gets sweeter as I continue,
“Your loss. You have lost something.”
He pretends to search for what he already knows. For what he has been ignoring. For what he hides from others. He is realizing he cannot stay hidden. He is exposed. Clothed nudity has that effect on a Being.
“How could you have known that?” A shiver throws off his posture as he re-straightens his spine. I wait as he continues.
“My stocks. My investments. Retirement. My life and dreams. I have lost it all this week. They are gone.”
He looks around as if he could pick them back up off the rusting rails. They are not there for him to collect.
The purple in the bags of his eyes expands to his cheeks as he becomes aware to his assumption that I am homeless. He thinks he has said something wrong. It is not wrong. It is not right. Assumption is a privilege for those not aware.
“Your money… Why is that important to you, friend?”
When he hears the word “friend”, I see a glow come off him. He cannot visibly detect it, but I see it,
as plainly as my hair grows. It is mild, but it is there. He offers the seat next to him as if it was his to give. It was already my seat before he gestured. I oblige. I shiver and shake the freeze off my shoulders. I giggle that seventeen-year-old giggle, because I can.
One single eyebrow rainbows off his plum face as his next words speak for his body in saying, “You are an odd little girl.”
I am not a little girl.
“Why is your money so important to you, friend?”
This time he thinks before he speaks. After the moon shifts its attention and the snow accumulates, he returns to me, quite lost in his mind, but squeaks out an attempt to answer.
“It was all that I had…
It is what I was good at…
It made me happy…”
Three simple phrases so difficult for him to speak.
I wait.
And wait.
I wait some more. He needs prompting.
“You are no longer happy?”
With flakes dripping off his nose and his remaining graying hair, he sits still. He looks quite abominable in a cartoonish-snowman way. There is the stillness. The stillness I was waiting for. The stillness he was waiting for. I can tell the flakes tickle his pores as he produces a smile. A real smile, not the shielded kind.
“I am grateful...” I watch silence fill him until he breaks it,
“for what I still have.”
He shivers off the stillness and finishes, “I am happy.”
He has discovered a real Truth.
Shuffling through his pocket, he garners a few coins to offer. He thinks he owes. I collect his will. He thinks this is what I want. I accept. It would be rude otherwise. The will of us as Beings. It is the only currency I manage. It just happens to be in the form of nickel and copper circles today.
“It looks as though you have not lost it all, sir.”
The echoing laugh shared between us is worth more than the thirty-seven cents. The real type of laugh that shakes your insides, not the obligatory entertainment variety.
“What’s your name?”
“That is also not important.”
I sit still with my new friend. We are quiet with one another in our wonder and energy. He is lighter. He is going to wake up new. The ripple will be glorious even though I will not be around to witness it. I am sure I will feel it along my path. He radiates a new heat as the flakes around him rapidly melt. I am unsure if he takes notice, but I see him. His blinks are inconsistent, matching him where he currently rests his hind.
When about half an inch of frosty goodness is surrounding my boots I stand. I bend down, am sure to breathe softly into his ear, and whisper, “Take this with you when you are ready.” I reach over with frayed fingerless gloves, drop a crystal into his hand, bow to him, and give him a wink. They always enjoy a wink. It is what will be remembered of me. I feel his eyes watch me go.
We always feel the eyes.
I make my way around the train station’s corner, shuffling my feet to decorate the snow’s layers, to nearly stumble over what I was not looking for. I see a Being asleep by the building’s vents, taking in what heat can be spared, yet he is cold and alone. The shape of his figure tells me he is accepting of his life as it is. He lays on his back in an awkward position. His belly is round, and his skin is dark. Something about him brings me closer. His eyes are closed through foggy glasses and he looks content in his slumber. Careful not to wake him, I drop thirty-seven cents in a Styrofoam cup that has been bitten on its edges with what teeth he has left. All dents add character.
I jump down into the woods away from the station’s lights, and struggle to find my path. My eyes slant, both in an attempt to get a better look and to drop the stinging winter’s tear that has been shallowly collecting on my eyeballs. I question if I see a silver shine behind me flash just briefly enough to show the path ahead. I turn towards the silver light and it is gone. Vanished like flakes under heavy boots. It was not nothing, yet I shrug my shoulders, letting more flakes fall off, and turn to where the beginning of the path was shown. There is adventure in finding my path in the darkness, yet I have learned to welcome any help, no matter how brief or potentially imaginary.
My home.
The home the clink, clank of the tracks foretold I was coming back to.
I stop to recognize that, indeed,
this is the beginning of a story.
COPYWRITE 2020
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