BOXCAR

She made him forget the fate of all beautiful things. He sits curled up in a ball in utter darkness in an empty boxcar, fondling the edges of a tattered photo in his coat pocket, his last image of her, with little edges protruding beyond the pages of a novel he could never seem to finish; The Plague, by Camus. The Plague had safely protected her for almost two years. Strangers might have thought the photo was just a bookmark, like he was halfway through a good piece of literature, one of those little novels that weigh more than they should, but he could never actually read it for more than an hour before the gloom and the impending darkness overwhelmed him.

Joshua Callum Cavanaugh flicks the edge of this photo, and smiles gently in a fuzzy memory of a peaceful evening that they once enjoyed together somewhere far away. He shivers in the darkness of the empty boxcar as it creaks and rattles westward. Hundreds of old steel wheels on a Union Pacific freight train, screeching at full speed along the steel rails, forming an unrelenting roar, mixing into a clunking rhythm that has remained constant since the train had slowed down for a few minutes around midnight to pass through a sleeping town, somewhere in the vast high plains of the Texas Panhandle.

Eyes wide open, pupils open and hungry for the pain and joy of it all, waiting, he yearns to engage that which no soul can thwart, and thus it begins—another ray of light, a pulsing signal, an ebullient rush of liquid, mercury-like white beams shooting through crevices, illuminating motes of glistening dust, floating galaxies, as the train roars westward through the storm. Some beams of light are fierce, coming from sources that are bright and close to the tracks, forming vivid shards of light that suddenly stab bright shafts across the empty space, a pinhole supernova. Arcs of light cut through the boxcar, sweeping forward. Other beams move slowly, coming from sources far away, lights left on like beacons for lost dreams, perhaps a dim porch light on a remote ranch house, and these softer rays of dim light move serenely, reassuringly, through the interior of the boxcar.

Three massive engines pull the long train, punching a hole through the fierce wall of low pressure that has blown arctic air all the way from the Bering Straight onto the Texas plains. Frigid cold makes sleep impossible. A tremor rises in his spine and he pulls his knees closer to his chest, hoping to save heat. Hunger makes being awake uncomfortable. No snacks, he reaches into his backpack to find a plastic bottle of water, the same one he has been refilling for over a week, slushy with ice, and he savors the flow of cold liquid that he took from a faucet behind a grain silo a few hours earlier in a fading prairie town. His mind drifts to her again; to her he descends in the darkness, until he reaches and holds her soft, intuitive hand in a dimly lit bar far away, listening to soft piano, inhaling her, watching the glow of a candle in her eyes.

He strokes his long beard and fondles hard beads of ice frozen onto the hair. Oblivious, detached, without flinching, he slowly pulls one away, yanking the hair out by the root. He wipes his lips with a black cotton glove that has the fingertips cut off. He has been shivering since yesterday afternoon, when dusk subsided to the darkness. The train keeps moving, clunking along, and the rhythmic sound of the railroad ties lulls him in and out of sleepy trances. He becomes alert for a moment, adjusts the hood of his coat over most of his face and watches another group of lasers sweeping through the boxcar. The train jostles him, a steady rocking motion, and his head falls back against the wall and his mouth falls slightly open.

In the hour before dawn, a weary comfort finally settles over him as he thinks of her, of the way she made him feel, and the way her hands understood him. He sniffs the frigid air until his lungs are full and his nose burns, and he ponders the faint scent of old wood and metal and a thousand untold cargos, come and gone. Too exhausted to sleep, his eyes barely open, he notices something at the opposite end of the boxcar. He blinks, taking another deep breath, trying to sharpen his senses, reassuring himself that he has seen the boxcar full of light several times throughout the night, and that it has been completely empty, but still, he squints, sure that he sees something on the floor: a dark silhouette of a man.

The train runs full speed. The sleep falls out of his ears and the sound of the track rises to a roar. A fierce laser slices into the boxcar. A ringing bell at a roadside crossing tolls intrusively and he twitches, frightened, feeling his heart pounding in his chest, and he sees the dark image of a limp body surrounded by a crimson pool of steaming liquid, the darker blood that comes from mortal wounds.

Panic strikes him in a jolt and he moans in horror. The dead body jostles with the motion of the train, as if it is still warm, still soft and fresh, still immune to rigor mortis. A leg and an arm are severed from the torso, a few feet away. Mangled meat and tendons and arteries dangle from the open wounds in an oozing pool of blood, a myriad of limp tentacles and tendons, severed veins and ligaments, their complexity denying any hope of reattachment. Limbs once united in one delicate miracle, now irrevocably torn; a finger on the severed hand moves.

He crawls forward cautiously, but freezes, halfway to the body, motionless, blinking, disbelieving. He looks closely; close enough to recognize the uniform, the equipment. He tries to see the face, trying to see who it is, when he realizes what is happening. His left hand comes up slowly, reaching forward as he begins to weep.

In a flash, the body is gone and he screams in anger. He scurries on hands and knees quickly across the floor of the boxcar, to the spot where he is sure he saw the body, and he slowly sweeps his fingertips where he had seen a dark pool of blood, then slowly, the same fingers moved to his cheek, now wet.

"Am I ..?"

His eyes flash wide open. He uncurls himself from the wall and rolls onto his hands and knees, then stands up slowly, pushing himself up off a knee, stretching the stiffness from his cold back like an old man. His eyes search in the flickering light that penetrates the darkness.

Soft gray light now illuminates the crevices and the warm steam of his breath rolls out in the freezing air. He feels his way along the wall till his fingers find the latch for the sliding door. He opens it a few feet. A rush of frigid air gushes into the empty boxcar and the dim light of dawn fills the spaces between all things with soft hues.

He casts a cynical glance backward to the place where he had seen the corpse, knowing that there will be no evidence, squinting to keep dust out of his eyes, expecting no clues, nothing but a vivid memory that will, like all memories, succumb to the...