ghost stars

I recognized the sound of the train from the dream I'd been having. In the dream, I was with John and we were happy. John and I, happy together, on a train? That's how I knew it was a dream. I still had my eyes closed and I winced as my head bounced against the window where I'd rested it as I slept.

Man, I must have partied really fucking hard last night, I thought. I didn't even remember getting to the BART station. I sat up and opened my eyes. I blinked several times, trying to clear my vision. My eyes were blurry with sleep and it was hard to see. I felt a little bit dizzy so I rested my head against the window again, trying to remember last night.

The last thing I could remember was being over at Angie's place. John hadn't been there, it was just me and some friends of Angie's. It had been a long time since John and I had spent any real time together. He was always making excuses to leave the apartment and then coming home hours later, too drunk to even stay awake sitting up.

I yawned and tried to open my eyes again, looking out the window. It was still pitch-black outside. In fact, I couldn't see many lights at all. I live just outside the city, but not that far outside the city. Where the hell are we? I thought. What the hell time is it?

I kicked around with my feet to see if I could feel my backpack. Usually, if I knew I were going to sleep on the train I'd loop one of the shoulder straps over my knee or around my ankle so no one could grab it without me noticing. I didn't feel it. I was more awake now. I sat up and felt for my phone in my jeans pocket - not there. I checked the pocket on the front of my hoodie - not there. I stood up too quickly and swayed with the train as I looked at the seats to see if it had fallen out of my pocket as I slept. No phone.

No backpack, either. Fear moved through me, slow and heavy. I dropped to my knees and looked under the seats for my backpack. Nothing. The train kept moving.

I felt sick. My mind began racing. I couldn't remember getting to the BART station. I couldn't remember leaving Angie's. I couldn't remember the last time I'd eaten anything. I thought I'd had a beer at Angie's, but just one, maybe two. I sat back in the seat and covered my face with my hands, pushing my fingertips into my brow as if I could push memory in and find myself that way. I stayed that way for a while, remembering nothing, but realizing something that had only just occurred to me: I wasn't on a BART train.

In the bleary first few moments after waking and the momentary panic of looking for my backpack and my phone, I hadn't truly taken in my surroundings. Now, I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. I wasn't on my normal train. Shit, I wasn't even on a normal train. The train car looked kind of old-timey, like from a movie. The seats were wide, covered with a crimson velvet. The armrests were dark wood. I ran my palm over one and was surprised by its smoothness, like silk, like the oils from thousands of hands had conditioned the wood over years and years. It must be so old. Where was I?

I raised my gaze and noticed that the light in the car was soft and yellow, coming from brass fixtures with beautiful domed glass shades. The walls and ceiling were the same rich, dark wood as the armrests. The floor was wooden, too, and a long carpet covered the walkway between the rows of seats. It occurred to me that I might be dreaming, still.

Too confused to be frightened, I let my body relax into the seat and looked out the window. It was still very dark. For an old train, it seemed like it was moving really fast. Occasionally, I thought I saw glimpses of light along the horizon but when I tried to train my eyes on them they disappeared. It reminded me of being little and lying out on a blanket with my Dad after dark. Sometimes, he could be so sweet with me. He would say, "Let's go count stars, kiddo," and we'd lie there on our backs and listen to insects while we looked up. There were always those stars that I could see when I wasn't looking at them directly, like little ghost stars, stars that were no longer visible when I shifted my gaze to try and see them better. With my forehead pressed to the cold glass and my eyes looking into the strangely dark night, that was what I was seeing now. Ghost stars.

Suddenly, I felt an overwhelming sadness. Everything was just too big. I didn't know where I was or what I was doing. I didn't even have my life planned out a day in advance. I closed my eyes and focused all my attention on breathing: In for six, out for six. It didn't work. I started crying despite myself, fat tears escaping my closed lids and falling on the gleaming, polished wood of the windowsill.

I heard a noise and I realized that I wasn't alone. There were two seats facing my own and someone had just sat down in one. I opened my eyes and sat up straight, looking down and wiping my tears with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. I allowed myself a quick glance at the woman who had taken the seat diagonal to my own.

She was an older woman. Her gray hair was braided and pinned up in an immaculate bun at the nape of her neck. Her dress was pretty; she looked dressed for church. She had on stockings and the shiniest leather shoes I had ever seen. There was a pair of short gloves draped over the side of her armrest. I guessed she had taken them off because she was now knitting, the needles clicking softly against each other. It looked like she was making a sweater for a baby: A fine blue yarn ran from the row of stitches on the needle down into a neat cloth bag she had tucked in by her side. She reached into the bag and pulled out the ball of blue yarn and as she did, she looked up at me and smiled.

Her eyes took me completely by surprise. Her eyes! There was something about them that was so familiar, like eyes I had seen before, and not just once or twice. They looked like the eyes of someone I knew very well. I was taken aback. I think I smiled but I had begun to feel so, so...out of my body that I'm not sure what my face looked like.

"How are you, sweetheart?" she asked me.

For a moment, I didn't know what to say. I tried to remember if I'd had dreams in which I had heard the voices of the other people in the dream. She sounded so real. Everything looked so real.

"Me?" It was the best I could do. My own voice sounded odd to me.

She laughed, and her laughter sounded light. It floated.

"Yes, you!" she said, "How are you faring?"

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes again. I pushed my fingertips into my eyes and saw spots. I groaned a little bit, just ever so slightly, in spite of myself.

"That badly?" she asked. She sounded concerned. "Oh, darling - it can be hard, that's for certain. And you're so young." She made a tsk sound and went back to her knitting.

"What can..." My voice came out like a croak. I coughed and stretched my neck to both sides, sitting up straighter. She had all my attention. I tried again. "What can be hard?" I asked.

She stopped knitting and set her knitting needles and their tiny, half-stitched sweater into her lap. "Why, getting on this train, of course! It was definitely difficult for me. I didn't think I was ready. I still don't! I would have liked to stay where I was for longer, even if it was only a little while, and still, I'm better off than many are, that's for sure. Why, look at you! Look at little Lily!"

She kept talking but I had stopped listening. Oh my god, I thought, I'm on an antique train with a crazy old woman in the middle of nowhere and I'm all alone without any of my things and I have no idea how I'm going to get back.

"You can't go back."

Her words drew me right back - and fast - from where I'd let my mind wander. I looked at the woman, baffled. "How did you know...?"

"...what you were thinking?" She smiled, and the smile looked warm and genuine. And those eyes, again. She kind of reminded me of my Grama, my Dad's Mom, but not really. I just couldn't shake the feeling that I knew her eyes.

"Sweetie," she continued, "all of us here in the train know more or less what the others are thinking. It must come from the connection we have. We're all more alike than you might first think."

I started crying. None of this made sense to me. I just put my hands over my face and started sobbing. Tears washed down my face, hot and salty. I felt the woman sitting down in the seat next to me and then a soft hand on my arm. "Oh, sweet girl...," she murmured. I opened my eyes and looked into hers, so startingly familiar.

"You don't know why you're here, do you?" she asked.

Sniffling, I shook my head no. She sighed. "We're just the bodies."

"What do you mean, 'We're just the bodies.'?" I asked, nausea making a cold pit in my stomach. She didn't say anything so I kept talking. "'Just the bodies?' What the hell does that mean?"

She took one of my hands in both of her own and leaned closer to me. "What was your name?" she asked.

"What was my name?" I repeated back, dully. "My name was Mika. My name is Mika, Mika Papadakis."

Her face lit up. "Oh! That's Greek, isn't it? Are you Greek?"

"Well, no," I said. "I'm American. Obviously. But yeah, my Papou was from Greece."

"Oh, Greece is lovely!" she exclaimed. Her face looked dreamy. "My husband and I took a ship to Greece. He was an archeologist and the university he worked for sent us both. It was before any of the girls were born so it was just the two of us. It lasted months and honestly, I wouldn't have felt badly if we'd just stayed there forever. Oh..." She trailed off for a moment, her eyes not seeing anything except whatever she was remembering. "Oh, Mika. I can still feel the heat of the sun on my legs, see the blinding white of the houses perched on the edge of the island cliffs, taste the retsina. Life is beautiful, Mika, it truly is."

My head felt cloudy and my eyes burned. "But why am I here? Why are we here?" My voice came out like a whisper, hardly more than the softest breath.

"I think you're starting to understand, aren't you?" she asked me. I started shaking my head, not because I didn't understand but because I wanted to deny the truth. I shook my head harder and harder until my ears rang. Through the ringing, I heard her voice.

"Mika! Stop!"

Her voice was sharp. I stopped.

"Dang. She be fightin' it, huh, Miz Gresham?" A new voice had appeared across from me. I opened my eyes and saw a tall, slender black man. He had a glorious afro and cheekbones to die for. He was dressed in striped bellbottom trousers and a very shiny shirt with an outrageous floral pattern. It was unbuttoned nearly to his navel. He was smoking the biggest, fattest blunt I had ever seen.

Mrs. Gresham still sat near me, holding on to my hand. Nobody spoke. The man took a long drag and exhaled a cloud of smoke that rose slowly, drifting over his head and lingering, a halo. I smelled nothing.

I pointed at him, baffled. "Your weed," I began, "I can't smell it."

He smirked. "You can't smell nothing, baby. That's not how shit works on the train."

I felt dumb and even more confused and it must have showed on my face because Mrs. Gresham cut in. "What Jerome is trying to explain, however clumsily..." She cleared her throat. "He's right. We don't have a sense of smell. I think it's to spare us some heartache, really. Think about how linked memory is to our sense of smell. Goodness, we'd be moping about all the time."

"Yeah," Jerome added, "It be hard enough knowing my time is over."

"Mrs. Gresham," I said, turning to her. "Who is Lily? You said something about Lily. And a 'connection' - what connection? What...is this?" I gestured around me in sort of a vague and useless fashion, at a loss for words.

Jerome tilted back his head and laughed, smoke puffing upwards as he did. "You on the soul train, girl," he smiled.

"'Soul Train'?" I asked, "Like that crappy TV show from the 70s?"

Jerome looked at me, annoyed. "I won't be hearing none of that. 'Soul Train' was the shit! Man, me and my boy Jaycee got us tickets back in '73. We took Amtrak into Hollywood and stood in that long damn line outside the studio in the motherfucking cold-ass dead of winter..."

"Your language!" Mrs. Gresham snapped. "I have told you before, Jerome, that in my day it was unthinkable that a man would speak like that in front of a lady. Please!"

"My bad, Miz Gresham, cuz you sho'nuff is a lady!" Jerome smiled broadly at Mrs. Gresham before turning his attention back to me. "Point is, Mika, after I got into that studio and they pumped up those amps and we started dancing I forgot all about those hours of waiting in the cold. But nah, girl, this ain't that kind of soul train. Everybody here? We all shared the same soul."

I was lost. I was completely and utterly lost. It was again Mrs. Gresham who came to my rescue.

"I mentioned the connection, Mika, when I thought that you knew where you were. Some of us arrive and we're already aware of what's happening; for others - like yourself, it would seem - assimilation is more trying. This is the connection we have: Every body in this train has held the same soul. We are connected on a spiritual level. You have died, my darling, and your soul can no longer inhabit your body on Earth. Your body has come here to rest, to join all the other bodies who have carried our soul through time. Your job, as soon as you are up to it, is to choose the next body that will hold our soul. It's the privilege of the incoming body to choose where our soul goes next."

"I died?" I had tried to listen to her, to understand her, but that was as far as I got. I was dead.

"Yes, sweetie," she said. Her voice sounded both sad and kind.

"How...?" I couldn't believe it. I was twenty-two.

"You OD'd, baby," Jerome said. "Man, and I'm sorry to tell you about it, too, because hell if I didn't lose too many friends that way. It's a terrible thing." He shook his head, his eyes filling with tears. "It's a terrible thing. "

I felt like my body had been put through a brick wall. Yes. I did. I did OD. I remembered so much, now. I remembered Angie calling me and telling me she had gotten some good shit, some real good shit, and that I should bring my tip share over to her place after work and get high with her and her friends. It would be worth it, she had said. It was real good stuff.

"Fuck," I said, clenching my hands into fists. "FUCK!" And then shamefaced, I looked at Mrs. Gresham. "I'm sorry," I muttered.

"Oh, I think I can let that one slide, given the circumstances," she said. "This may seem too forward, but would you like a hug?"

I threw my arms around the body of this woman I didn't know and cried and cried. When my sobbing calmed, she pulled back from me and looked into my eyes.

"But you do know me," she said. "Just like you knew my eyes. Because in some strange way, sweetheart, they're your eyes."

"Oh, boy...here she gon' go," Jerome said, "'Eyes the window to the soul' and all that. Mika, look at me." He looked at me with eyes that were dark pools, slightly bloodshot. "You know my eyes?"

A feeling came over me, suddenly. A feeling of belonging. A feeling better than getting high. I looked into Jerome's eyes and I did know him. Sitting here with these two strangers on the soul train I felt more loved and more safe and more peaceful than I had in a long, long time.

"Yeah, man," I said softly, "I do."

"Come on now, Mika!" He laughed and shook his head. "You're just sayin' that for Miz Gresham's benefit. Y'all are too much for me. I'm gon' take off an' see who else want to shoot the breeze." He stood up and I saw just how tall he was. He nearly had to duck to get back into the aisle, his hair brushing against the smooth wooden ceiling.

He turned around in the aisle. "But hey, Mika?" I nodded. "You gon' do just fine, girl." He smiled and took another drag on his joint, the cherry very nearly burning the tips of his fingers. He moved away from us, the rhythm of the train rocking him as he went.

"Mrs. Gresham? Who is Lily?" I asked.

"Lily usually sits in the corner of the car. There's a bench where she can stretch out. She's our littlest - would you like to meet her?" she asked.

"Sure," I said.

"Well, come on, then," she said, standing up.

We moved back through the train car and as we approached the far corner, I saw a little girl sitting on the edge of the velvet seat, her legs swinging gently forward and back, forward and back.

I crouched down on the floor in front of her seat. She was tiny and adorable. She couldn't have been more than two. She looked at me quietly, her sweet chubby cheeks so inviting I wanted to grab her and kiss her.

"Are you Lily?" I asked.

She nodded.

"Why are you here?" I asked her.

She looked at me somberly, too still and too quiet for such a very young person. Her voice was tiny but as sweet and clear as an angel's.

"I fell," she said.

A wave of emotion knocked me back hard on my butt and I started to cry again. Mrs. Gresham held my shoulders and said, "Come, now. You'll frighten Lily. Sit up in this seat with me." And to Lily, she said, "She's all right, angel. She's just arrived and she's having quite a hard time, poor thing." Lily just nodded.

The sleeve of my hoodie was now sodden but I wiped away at my eyes and my nose the best I could. "So what do I do now?" I asked Mrs. Gresham.

"Well, if you're ready, you choose the next body," she said. "Don't worry - I'll show you how. Are you ready?"

I figured I was as ready as I was going to be, so I nodded.

"Lily, would you like to come with us?" Mrs. Gresham asked. Lily answered by lifting both of her arms overhead, and I asked, "Is it all right if I hold you?" She turned to me, arms outstretched, and I picked her up. She put her little arms around my shoulders and laid her head down on my shoulder. I could feel one small hand patting my back.

"Aw, there. That's better, isn't it?" said Mrs. Gresham.

Yes. It was. I carried Lily carefully down the aisle of the swiftly moving train, following Mrs. Gresham to the other end of the car. She reached the far end and stood next to a wall that was covered with a heavy velvet curtain. She drew the curtain back to reveal a large screen that was set into the wall. She touched the surface and a glowing image of the rotating Earth appeared. I was startled by this hi-tech panel, so conspicuous and out of place in the antique car. My face must have registered my surprise because Mrs. Gresham chuckled and spoke.

"Well, there have been some upgrades over the years. But that's why we keep it covered with the velvet curtain. It doesn't quite fit, does it?" Smiling at me, she continued. "So, here we have our precious and wonderful planet Earth. This is the only planet our soul has visited, thus far. Other soul families belong to other star clusters and once in a great while, a soul that is very special can jump from one to another, but I can bore you with all that another time. My point in mentioning it is to say that the next body that holds our soul will be from Earth, as they all have been."

I was having some trouble absorbing everything that had been said to me since I'd woken up...what had it been? An hour? Several hours ago? Did it matter? I tried to focus on what Mrs. Gresham was telling me as she tapped her fingertip at different points on the touchscreen.

"I'm going to bring up a list of babies who will be born in roughly the next hour or so. If one is born before you decide then the listing will simply disappear from the screen. You see, when a baby draws her first breath that is the moment that the soul moves into her body. That energy will reside within her until she breathes her last mortal breath, like you did yesterday. A soul with no body is restless energy, and restless energy can be very destructive. We try to encourage our newcomers to find a new body for our soul as quickly as we can. Are you ready to look?"

I nodded. She gestured towards the screen and I saw a list: Names of countries, names of parents, number of siblings, born and not yet born...there were several labels and categories that didn't even make sense to me.

"Lily, can you help me?" I was still holding her, her warm weight a comfort to me. She sat up in my arms and held out her pudgy baby hand, pointing. She had pointed to a listing labeled: Michoacán, México.

"Mexico, huh?" I smiled at her. "It works for me."

"Are you sure you wouldn't like to take more time looking at the options?" Mrs. Gresham asked.

"Nah," I said, "I trust Lily."

*****

2 August 2022

Apatzingán, Michoacán, México

It had been raining for several days, now, and the newscaster said that it would keep raining for several more. With the rain came a change. Though the baby wasn't due for another week, at least, Carmela felt her belly drop further every day. The weight of the baby pushed against her everywhere, now, under her ribcage, into her kidneys, and down through the bowl of her pelvis and between her legs. Ya no puedo aguantar mucho más, she thought, shifting her body into a slightly less uncomfortable position.

At first, she thought that she was peeing her pants, but as she stood up the gush of clear liquid that followed told her everything she needed to know. She laughed, because it was like god had heard her thoughts.

"José!" She called to her husband. He was outside, fixing something or working in the garden, but the window was open and the curtains moved in the breeze from the storms.

"José! Ya es hora!" This time, he heard her, and she laughed as she heard the rapid footfalls of her husband running to help her, eager to meet his son.