The Contagion in the Countryside: Train

Rumble of heavy railcars throughout the dark house: an unending pulsing drone of hoppers, flatcars, reefers, grain haulers, intermodals, centrebeams, tank cars. No train now passes through this valley. Beyond my walls is only the silence of the surrounding mountains under May’s stars. Indoors, however, steel wheels press down on steel rails, and the clatter seems ominous, as if the cargo constitutes a threat beyond “Hazardous Goods,” as if this routing through my rooms is a confirmation of trouble, not a warning. Ordinarily, a quiet trails the end of any train while it shrinks up the tracks. At my house, when the sound fades and disappears for a time, it leaves in its wake a disturbance—as on mornings after an unsettling dream, long after the nightmare’s details have vanished, a sense of menace fogs my day. Where the black train was dispatched from is as shrouded as its destination and what powers its travel. Yet boxcar after boxcar, gondola after gondola, is an insistent presence in my mind. I feel I cannot escape climbing aboard, that this conveyance will draw me into the other night.The post The Contagion in the Countryside: Train first appeared on The Walrus.