Railing

You can never really see what’s inside a person. She was like this heart shaped locket she wore—lovely, and right there in plain sight, but closed. I had watched it hang for years, there, around her neck. It was her last trinket from her former life and it had become, for me, a symbol of everything I would never know about it. Everything that had brought her here, to this prison.

I was never meant to work in the prison, but wars have a way of changing what’s meant to be. I’m from a place we call the Rails. It’s a place just like it sounds. Where old and young and broken people without shoes or hope spend their lives moving boxes. There, in the hulls of the new world's finest trains, we would carefully wipe the sweat and blood of the old world away, every day, before sending those trains off toward that distant skyline. Like clockwork. We were cheaper than the machines that brought the boxes to us and cheaper than the machines that carried them away and we never forgot it. I had spent my whole life on those trains, moving boxes I never knew the contents of. Boxes with addresses to places I only knew because I saw them on the old TV they had at the bar on Beacon Hill.

For people in the Rails every memory is born and dies at the Beacon Hill Bar. It’s where my father took me for a piece of cake every year for my birthday until I was twelve, and a pint every year after. It was the place he told me he had met my mother. It was the place where every father met every mother. And it was the place we came after we buried them all. Like my father had done for my mother. Like I had done for my father, seven years ago. For all the years since, though, the Beacon Hill Bar was nothing to me until it became the place where I first saw her.

I had finished the day and decided to wander over to Beacon Hill for the first time in a long time to sit down with a drink, and with the memory of my father, and with a few hours of wondering about what he was wondering at my age. As I did, the tv rambled on in the corner like it always did, full of the sights and sounds of that world beyond the Rails. Enchanting reminders that there were people, far away, not so disenchanted. Then, in all that rambling—I saw her. The most beautiful thing I ever saw. A girl. Hooded. Somber. Then, just like that—chuckling at the president. It was a small gesture, quickly squelched. But in a sea of fearful faces, a grin stands out like an oak in a flat field.

That night I raced back to my barracks through the cold air, in a cold sweat. I slammed the door behind me and ignored the grumblings of the eleven other men I lived with. We were always short on space in the Rails. I think the powerful know that. Know there’s a kind of poison in never having room, or quiet. The kind of poison that keeps you arguing over who stole the last loaf or cigarette or word, instead of arguing over why there’s only one loaf. That day though, I was taking some space back. I sat on the blue tile floor of the bathroom, in silence, for hours under the guise of sickness and in my way, I was sick. Given to the illness of tracing every feature of a young woman I had just seen in the corner of a tv screen. I redrew that grin in my mind's eye, and the face that it belonged to, and the locket that hung beneath it.

My father always said, a man in the Rails needs a dream to survive. He said his dream was that I might make it out of the Rails. My dream had always been that I wouldn’t need one. That I might go on in that loud, crowded, place forever but I'd have some silence, free of dreams, in my mind at least. And I did. But silence left my mind the day she entered it. I couldn't explain it, but I knew even then, on that bathroom floor, that I was fashioning the dream I would retire to every night and wake to every morning for the rest of my life. Of course, I never dreamed I would see her in real life. But when people start talking about revolution you start to learn what’s real and what isn’t. You learn that some men spend their whole lives grumbling about the way things ought to be and given the chance to choose, they choose grumbling over ought to be. Then there are some men who never say a word and when freedom walks by, they scream to follow it. I hadn’t learned yet what kind of man I was, all I knew is I didn’t like the sound of grumbling and now I had a dream about a woman.

It took years for talk of revolution to turn into pamphlets about revolution to turn into meetings about revolution. All the while, I kept to my dream, quietly, and kept to moving boxes. The boxes had taken on a new life for me. As I moved them, I’d look at their addresses and do what I had never done before—wonder what was inside them and who they were for. I couldn't quite imagine what was in them, but I imagined they were all for her. That somehow, I had played some small part in keeping that grin alive.

In all my imagining, I must have started moving things faster or better or else everyone else stopped as the war got started. Either way, they asked me to stop moving boxes and start moving people. Of course, they don't ask, they just tell. When they told me, they did it with a smile and a pat on the back. I’d known for a long time that I had the respect of the bosses. An odd class of creature who weren't Railers but who were, nonetheless, in the Rails. They all lived up by the prison no one talked about, in a little neighborhood no one saw, with high walls even children didn't care to peak over. I suppose we had all made some silent agreement that whatever was behind those walls was probably just some smaller version of what was behind that tv screen at Beacon Hill and that whatever was there to find wasn’t worth the trouble of finding it. Whatever the reason, Railers had never known where the prisoners from that other world went, when they went through the Rails. All we knew is that once a month a train moved along the prison line, filled with shadows, and disappeared behind the gates. Only now, once a week had become once a day.

As I started to work the prison line, I learned where those trains went. I learned that when they looped through those gates, they stopped at a small platform and men and women in dark robes were shuffled out of the cars and into the prison. As I held those those doors, and watched that shuffle, I learned other things too. Things about that other world that I’d never heard on the Beacon Hill tv. I learned that the revolution didn't just belong to the Rails. I learned that there were a long list of reasons someone might end up here, but that list was written by one man. And, I learned that if you stood on platform six when the four o'clock train rolled in you could see exactly where today's prisoners were going tomorrow. Like clockwork. I tried to avoid platform six at four o'clock, like I had tried to avoid the pamphlets at the Beacon Hill Bar, and avoid answering all those questions about what kind of man I was. But, delayed or on time, answers have a way of always arriving. Mine arrived on a day when the train I was waiting for hadn't arrived at all and as a result, in a rare occurrence, I found myself standing on platform six at four o'clock.

If I had ever imagined seeing her in person, I supposed I imagined seeing her in her in a crowd, like the one she was standing in when I first saw her on tv, under that hood, with that grin, all those years ago. But when I saw her she was standing alone. Standing alone in one of those shadowy robes, bare footed, and muddied, and stepping towards a rope. It takes about five minutes to sprint from platform six to the courtyard in view of it and each one had been in vain. I arrived, dashing, just in time to see her dashed to the ground.

She had come in the night before on someone else’s shift, on someone else’s train. It was the last train to ever arrive in the Rails because the train I had been waiting for that day would never come. Railers had taken over the tracks. As I knelt before her, taking her locket from the mud and into my hands, they took over the prison too. That five minutes was all that separated her death and her freedom, give or take a pair of bolt cutters. Someone has to be the last person to die in a war and she was the last one to die in this one.

I don’t know how long I sat there, in the middle of the end of a war. Around me, prisoners were being cut free and bosses were making their own sprit to platform six, in vain. At the prison, Railers started bashing in doors and ripping open drawers and at the tracks, they were bashing in train windows and ripping open boxes. In them were things no one could have imagined which is to say, perfectly normal things. All the things we had here, just more of it and prettier.

It won’t take long for the same men who had broken the train windows to start repairing them. Most men don’t want to stop the boxes moving, they just want to change whose moving them. I suppose the enemy will move the boxes now. Suppose some years will pass, and those new world folks will become the old world folks and after enough boxes are moved and enough sweat and blood is spilt, another revolution will be printed on pamphlets in the Beacon Hill Bar. And another me will love another her. And another her will die. This is what I thought about as I dug the hole.

As I laid her in the bottom of it, I fixed her locket round her neck. That locket that I had watched hang for years there around her neck, in my mind. I wanted to open it, to see what was inside it, to get some clue as to what brought her here, to this prison, to the Rails. But, while she was my dream, I hadn’t been hers. In truth, that grin gave me every clue I needed. So, I buried her with this closed locket. Full of all things that she might have been.

The sun is coming up now, and the borders are open. I’m burying my dream with her, but I think I’ll go and see about my father’s and take my first steps outside the Rails. If you find this locket, know it belonged to a woman who was from a different world but who was loved by a Railer—and put it back, unopened.