👨🏻🦳☵☠️
Only on his deathbed did he come to terms with what had happened. He was surrounded by family then, and none of them wanted to admit they felt bad for him, that it really wouldn’t seem like such a tragedy for him to die. That’s the thing with death – nobody can speak the truth after everything is over.
Death felt like being tired and having the opportunity to finally go to sleep. It had been a long life.
As he had expected, it wasn’t easy to make it to the afterlife. He found himself walking through a heavily wooded forest, dark with grief and expectation. The path on the floor of the forest had been cleared for him by someone else. It seemed an eternity that he was there, his breath heavy and visible.
He soon found himself at a great glade that opened up onto a great body of water. As he looked onto the dark river, he felt cold and alone. He waited for someone to come and to validate him, for other souls to pour into that same purgatory. The water was black and reflective like a mirror. He saw his own old, withered and deflated face staring back at him. The crushing weight of his life pressed down on him. A single tear escaped his eye and rolled down his wrinkled and sun spotted skin. Respecting the laws of gravity, the teardrop continued to fall until it irrevocably interrupted the surface of the water. It was then that the main event of his life began to play one last time for him on the surface of the water.
👨🏻🦳☵☠️
He had first met her when they were already in their thirties. They both had children, he from a current marriage, and she from a previous marriage, so it is only natural that they met at one of the cramped and stressful parent-teacher evenings that must be attended to avoid feeling like a bad parent. The parents were all made to sit in the hallway and called into the teacher’s office one by one.
He sat on a rough plastic chair in the echoing hallway, occupied primarily by the newspaper in front of him. After about 40 minutes of passive waiting, he shifted a bit and considered getting up to go to the toilet.
As he lifted his gaze up from the page, he noticed that someone had snuck onto an identical blue chair on the other side of the hall. She had short, jet black hair and was wearing a dress with tiny trains printed onto it. He discovered her fidgeting demeanour and inquisitive aura. She was pretty enough, but by no means stunning. There was something else about her that demanded his attention.
“Don’t you just hate coming to these things?” she asked him.
He didn’t know what to say because he wasn’t used to women speaking to him first.
After overcoming his surprise, he discovered that she worked as a train conductor and was originally from another smaller town not too far from where they were currently situated.
“Sir,” demanded the teacher from the doorway.
“Oh..,” he said, “Maybe…maybe I’ll see you around some time?” he asked hesitantly.
“Tomorrow, 18:15 sharp at the station,” she said without blinking.
He was too surprised to protest and gave her a small wave in response.
👨🏻🦳☵☠️
When the time of their meeting drew closer, he considered standing her up. She had been quite strange after all. Certainly not his usual type. But by the time the clock struck 18:00, he was sitting comfortably in the armchair, reading another newspaper and smoking a pipe.
“Oh, what the hell,” he thought.
Upon his arrival to the station he remembered that they had not decided on an exact meeting spot. He stood awkwardly in front of the only cafe at the station, eyeing down every single person who passed him. After having come this far he wasn’t in the mood to give up.
He had no luck for about five minutes, so he reinstalled himself to wait by the train tracks. She had told him that she was a conductor, so the area around the train tracks seemed like a natural place for her to be. Sure enough, within a few minutes he saw her waving to him from the steps that led into the train. She made a beckoning motion with her hand, urging him to come closer. He approached her in a confused manner. He hadn’t expected to be getting onto a train, let alone into one that seemed ready to depart.
Despite his doubts, there was nothing more he could have done to avoid it. Although he wasn’t the best kind of person, he wasn’t the worst kind of person either. After having come this far there was no way he could let her down.
Once on the train, the conductress didn’t speak. Instead, she took his hand and guided him securely to the front of the train. She sat down first on one of the backless, leather stools, motioning to him to take a seat next to her. She stared down at the panel board. The blinking lights were like stars dancing around the night sky. She pressed several of them and began to steer. The train lurched forwards.
“Hey, I…” he started, but it was too late.
Her eyes were animated as she led the charge. It felt like the train was speeding forwards incredibly quickly, although it was an illusion brought about by them sitting at the front of the train. As they sped on, the trees at the side of the train tracks blurred together into a single mass of green, red and yellow. She laughed and looked at him.
“We’re almost by the mountains now,” she said.
In the window to their right, a range of hefty mountains sprung up, their white tips reaching up to the skies like the tips of very pointy ice cream cones. Mist enveloped some of the edges of the mountains, turning the scene into a mystical display of science fiction.
He watched in wonder as an entire world opened like a blooming flower in front of him. There were deer running alongside them, playfully nudging one another. A tumultuous, singing stream sprung up to their side. There was so much to see and not enough time to look because the train was moving forwards so quickly.
They continued this way for a while longer until they came across an abandoned station. Its sodden wood boards looked as if they were ready to cave in at any moment. To his confusion, this is where they made a stop.
“We’ve arrived,” she said cheerily.
“But….what about the passengers?” he asked.
“There are no passengers,” she said. Now that she mentioned it, he had been too confused earlier to make note of the fact that there had been no passengers streaming into the train while he had gotten in.
Upon disembarking the train, he noticed that the floor of the station was sturdier than he had expected. There was also an iron flavour in the air, one that he could not accurately pinpoint, but one that made the environment distinct to any he had been in previously.
The conductress trod on with a quick and unwavering pace, not bothering to glance behind her to make sure that he was following. They soon skipped down the wobbly stairs at the entrance of the station. The trees around them here were similar to the ones they had seen earlier from the window of the train. Up close their leaves were luscious and magnificent. Birds chirped and fluttered around the trees. She took his hand and led him approximately 100 meters southwards to a place where there was a path outlined for them. The precision of her knowledge made it seem as if she had been here before.
Here the path amongst the trees was clearly outlined for them. Before long they traversed a hanging bridge that dissected a noisy waterfall. The wooden planks comprising the bridge seemed similarly sodden to the ones that had made up the station.
Once on the other side of the bridge, their environment gave way to a complete scene of natural harmony. A stream ran around them, singing for them to sit at its side. Frogs croaked to commemorate their arrival. Some curious rabbits with bright eyes and erect ears watched them to assess their next move.
The conductress coolly removed her leather loafers and stood in the stream with the water up to her ankles. She motioned for him to join her. The water was some of the freshest he had ever felt on bare skin. He momentarily interrupted the stream with his finger to ensure that it was all real.
They didn’t say much to one another. Instead, they watched quietly as the nature around them settled down for the night. The change occurred around half past 7, when even the woodpeckers finally retired to their wooden enclaves.
👨🏻🦳☵☠️
These meetings continued, with each visited destination more outrageous than the last. Although the train always set off towards the same direction, they always reached a different end-point. There was so much to see, and too little time spent in each of these places.
Surprisingly, there wasn’t much actual discourse that went on during these encounters. The man justified keeping the friendship a secret from his wife due to the fact that he had done nothing wrong. Apart from holding his hand every so often, the conductress seemed to have very little interest in him physically. She never asked about his personal life, and after approximately five dates he realised that she didn’t even know his full name.
Nevertheless, he was always on time, Tuesday at 18:15, waiting for her at the train tracks. His previously tiny life had been unraveled at its seams. There was comfort in finding a real reason to carry on.
👨🏻🦳☵☠️
Despite imagining himself to be sneaky, the man’s wife had begun to noticed that his story was somewhat poorly curated. For a while now he had told her that 18:15 on Tuesdays marked a weekly office meeting. One Tuesday evening, when it was almost midnight and the husband had yet to return, the wife decided to act on her inkling. She had an idea of what was going on, but it just didn’t make sense to her why his meetings with some other woman would occur so consistently at a certain time on a weekday. There was no weekly increase in the meetings either, and he always came back home for the night. The combination of these factors left her questioning the true state of things.
The next day, having confirmed with his boss that the weekly meeting story was most certainly a ruse, the wife decided to take matters into her own hands.
On the following Tuesday, she followed him. The wife was very careful with her tactics, so careful that she could be sure to know that he couldn’t recognise her. She had borrowed her mother’s hat and sunglasses for the occasion, and was wearing a different jacket compared to her usual one. Just as she had planned, the wife didn’t catch the husband’s eye. She was stupefied once she saw him making his way up to the station.
“Where the hell is he going?” she thought.
She followed him onto the tracks and saw another woman waiting for him at the doorway of the train. Anger bubbled up to her throat like battery acid. The wife saw red as her husband climbed into the train to meet the other woman. In her flight of pure rage, the wife’s heart gave out. She fell motionless onto the ground, dead as a stone. The conductress and the man looked at her, but the husband failed to recognise his own wife as a result of her disguise.
👨🏻🦳☵☠️
That same evening the police met him at his doorstep. An autopsy was to be conducted and there was no certainty of his innocence. He knew then that lying wouldn’t be an option, as bystanders had certainly seen him visiting the station every Tuesday. He told the police everything that had happened without leaving anything out. At first the police didn’t believe him entirely, but they understood enough to blame him for his wife’s death.
👨🏻🦳☵☠️
The Tuesday following the end of his wife’s life marked his last meeting with the conductress.
“This must be the last time we see one another,” he said to her.
“I understand,” said the conductress. She hugged him and he cried, his tears forming a salty sop of sadness on her back.
After that he lived alone, smoking pipe after pipe and reading newspaper after newspaper. His boss kept him on out of pity for his situation.
👨🏻🦳☵☠️
The vision on the surface of the pond drew to a close. Suddenly he knew that his deeds were mundane. Everything he had ever done had been done for nothing and to no particular ends. Glancing around the body of water he spotted other people also repeating their visions of importance that nobody else would care to remember. He decided then, conveniently before his death, that the secret of people is that all their problems are similar. All the good deeds and all the evil deeds are just repeats of something someone else had done before. When the details are stripped down, the story is always the same.
With that thought piercingly clear in his mind he stripped down and immersed himself into the dark water of the lake.
👨🏻🦳☵☠️
WAST WRTNG 