Dark Hollow Freight Train

It was hot and muggy outside.

Martha Woodburn started in on her husband, Craig, but only in her head. Craig didn’t know it, but Martha had been going to therapy twice a month for the last seven as a last-ditch effort to save her marriage from its impending doom.

Martha Miller and Craig Woodburn met at the end of high school in Steubenville, Ohio, a place neither of them ever left. It wasn’t far from Pittsburgh, and their daughter, born soon after their marriage in their early 20s, loved the Nutcracker Village created by the town every holiday season. The pain and expense of moving and the all-but-guaranteed yearly joy on their daughter’s face was enough to cease for good the very slight impetus of moving out of that sleepy, sad town.

Krista Woodburn, just shy of eighteen, sat with headphones on in darkness on the floor of her closet with a nagging anxiety that her mother might interrupt her; er, well…might interrupt him, just as Martha had last Friday. Paul Jamison, who ran MindWars out of Houston, Texas, mesmerized Krista with his passion, which often presented as anger, and the occult subjects Paul was willing to discuss with his audience of more than 100,000 worldwide on a weekly basis. He was almost finished for the morning, so Paul began his wrap-up with his usual schtick in his raspy, bellowing bullfrog voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we don’t have much time left.” Paul leaned over his desk and gripped his hands tighter together as if they could intersect any deeper than he already had them. “The elite are going to try to take away our freedoms. There are too many of us. They’re scared. They’re shakin’ in their boots. We have to stand our ground and fight back, keep our minds free from the mass media garbage that BMM and Weasel News put out, and be ready to protect our families. At all costs. I won’t let mine fall at the feet of the elite. The right to bear arms is ours. The right not to have chips implanted in our head or drink the Kool-Aid is ours. That’s what our founders fought so hard for in this country, and I’ll be damned if I let it slip through my hands. Freedom or die. That is our choice. It’s the only choice.” Cortisol filled Krista’s body as it had every time Paul spoke through her headphones and directly into her brain for the past year.

Weasel News played softly on the television in the living room. Even in its muted volume, Weasel News could still make the hair stand up on the back of its viewer’s head. The fear was palpable, and it radiated from the screen. The pundit’s vitriol toward BMM put a metallic taste in the mouth of all who listened. The Woodburns always had Weasel News on in the morning as everyone readied for their days. It was Craig’s comfort via an injection of confirmation bias before he headed into the wide world overrun with dirty liberals.

Without warning, Martha opened Krista’s closet and found Krista on the floor. “Krista! You’re going to be late!” Martha hissed and left the room before making sure that Krista got up and out of her cave. Once Krista heard Martha banging around in the kitchen, she emerged and went to the mirror attached to her dresser, which Krista had once adorned with a MindWars sticker, an act of defiance Martha forbade. Its residue in the mirror’s upper right-hand corner reminded Krista that she could never be who she was in Steubenville, Ohio. Krista put on her waist-high jeans and a Rolling Stones vintage t-shirt, which she promptly changed for a pink polo from the Gap.

Martha had been sleeping on the couch for eight months or so, which she outwardly attributed to Craig’s snoring. But the truth was that Martha couldn’t stand being next to Craig in bed. The ceiling above their bed closed in on Martha, and the oxygen left the room every time she found herself next to him now. She became suffocated by something that felt like death. Craig didn’t seem to notice or care, which tectonically shifted Martha so that she was about to become a volcano with a smoke plume that would have rivaled Mt. St. Helens on May 18, 1980. It was easier to follow her therapist’s suggestion and take some space, and Craig’s worsening snores due to his lack of exercise and poor diet were the perfect cover. Craig loved key lime pie. He used to look at Martha the way he looked at that pie, even after she had Krista, but he hardly looked at her at all anymore.

Martha was 40 now, hiding the grays in her hair every six weeks or so for about $150.00, and doing all she could to hold onto her youth. Martha’s paints had dried long ago, and old half-finished canvases gathered mouse droppings and dust in the back corner of the shed in the Woodburns’ unkempt yard, behind the lawnmower that no one had started for three months. Instead, Martha now spent her free time scrolling through MaskRoll, an online forum where people from all over the world uploaded pictures of their happiest moments for all to see, despite their internal state of perpetual misery. The support the people who posted these pictures received released a shot of dopamine into their brains, and they couldn’t stop, much like rats who continuously press a button in exchange for a reward that will lead to their most certain death. Martha lived in that world now. She found herself wondering why she wasn’t as happy as her friends from high school, why the food she made didn’t look like the food made by the other women in her neighborhood, and why Craig never took her out to eat or on vacation like everyone else’s husbands. Martha showed her support for someone’s trip to Italy with a checkmark that would show up on their account next to Martha’s name. Martha felt the lines on her face and the sag of her neck beneath her chin. Time eroded what little definition her jawline once had. The women in the photos were older than Martha and their husbands held them like they were the last drink of water on a hot summer’s day in the Saharan Desert. Smiling, laughing, lineless, sag-less. Martha opened a new tab and searched for local Botox aestheticians. She even opened a tab to search for chin liposuction. What is there after youth but death?

Craig was almost ready to leave for work and he let Martha know. “I’m about to leave.”

His eyes were angled down and never looked up. Martha knew because she was staring at him unblinkingly. Craig turned toward the door, and it was open and closed before she could say anything in return. Martha ran to the door and slammed it against the coat rack on the wall behind it.

“Craig!” Martha was still in her nightie, spotted with tiny pink flowers. Craig rolled his eyes and turned his head halfway around.

“What? I need to leave.” Craig wanted nothing to do with Martha. He hadn’t for some time. But he was able to think about other things most of the time unless she pressed the issue, which she was doing now.

“I need you.” Craig hated how needy Martha had become. Why couldn’t she take care of herself? Why was she so pathetic? He turned around. “Not now.”

Martha grew indignant and her eyes watered. “Craig, how will you want someone who’s older, less attractive than I am right now? That’s our future. I don’t know what to do!” Craig’s eyes met hers for the first time in over a week. “Why don’t you go to my closet and explain yourself? But later. I have to go.” Martha was speechless. Craig started his truck and left the driveway without looking back.

Martha ran to the closet and swung the door open. On the floor was a medium-sized brown paper box that had already been opened. Martha ripped the box anyway. That’s when she knew her marriage was over. She stumbled toward the bathroom mirror, her body, in complete shock, in sensory overload to the point of utter numbness. Martha looked in the mirror and began to hallucinate, even before she took the pills, which she took anyway from the hidden cabinet behind the mirror, without a chaser. Martha felt her esophagus squeeze the little foreigner down, down, down, into the pit of her stomach where it would be absorbed, and where it would soon swim in her morning wine. The darkness under her eyes engulfed her entire face and made its way down to her heart. She could not move a muscle and could think of nothing else. You are trash. Martha knew she would be thrown out as such in the coming days. She rummaged through the back of her overcrowded bathroom cabinet and found a pack of Parliaments over a decade old. She lit one anyway. Old mascara from the night before stained her face.

Krista heard her mother crying in the bathroom and knocked on the door to the master bedroom even though it was already open.

“Mom, are you smoking?” Martha coughed but didn’t try to hide the smoke. She took another drag. “No, Honey. It’s a candle. You get on to school, Sweetie.”

The scene was not a new one for Krista. Her mother’s melodramatics had plagued the Woodburn house since Krista entered adolescence, since Krista had started to step into her womanhood. The pull of Martha’s histrionics was as the moon to the tides of the ocean, and it took all of Krista’s energy not to wind up drowned. Krista looked to her right and saw the ripped brown paper box. The Woodburn ship was a sinking ship.

A voice from deep inside Krista roared, and the caverns within her echoed its sentiment. Now. Krista looked at her mother once more through a crack in the door of the bathroom, where her mother’s dead eyes stared blankly ahead and back and forth until she was rapt, and Krista decided not to say anything. Indeed, Krista quietly closed the front door behind her, found her way to Sunset Boulevard, and stuck her thumb out, never to return to Steubenville, Ohio. She didn’t even look in the rearview mirror to see Steubenville, Ohio, disappear into the ether.