The Train

I felt really clean.

I smiled myself awake

and everything was gold

for a second. Sunlight poured

through these big bay windows

as a forest whizzed by. At this speed

the trees were a watercolor painting of green.

I had been on a train before.

But I had never been on this train.

I wasn't mad, but I was very confused.

The ceiling was see-through, but it wasn't glass or plastic. It was like a bubble that wouldn't pop even while the wind stretched and pulled it. Through the soapy colors the light fractured into moving stained glass shadows.

"Whoa." I whispered to no one. The train shot out of the forest and into grasslands and meadows. For the first time, I took a look around the car and saw that I was alone.

I stood up and took a few steps into the aisle way.

Looks like I'm really alone, I thought as I peered around. I got weirdly excited.

This is it, I'm getting superpowers, or some sort of magical destiny, holy shit, holy shit. I just knew it. This was how all the movies started. I instinctively looked around for a talking animal guardian.

I started laughing out loud and dancing in a circle. I rushed into the nearest window seat and pressed my face onto the glass. I wanted to smell all that green and blue out there. This place felt so clean. For whatever reason I started crying a little bit for a few minutes.

This is gonna be a cool story. Like a real emotionally damaged teenager from earth gets to be a hero in another dimension story. I thought as I stepped back into the aisle, walking up a few rows.

It's silly, but that really meant a lot to me. That possibility. I felt really clean standing under that fractured light.

"Whoa, you look radiant under the bubble canopy!" said a voice from behind me.

I turned around and saw something I could only describe as a triangle morphing into a circle. It didn't have a face but somehow it was smiling at me. It was made out of lightning, but also Jell-O?

"My name is Tammy with a y and I am your biblically accurate guardian angel." It said in an older sister sort of voice.

"Tammy with a y." I began.

"So Yammy?" I finished.

"No, Tammy with a y." She tossed back.

"Yammy?" I asked again in the voice you use on bus drivers and lunch ladies.

"Yammy is fine." she sighed. I thought about the situation for a second.

I looked at the bubble roof, I looked out of the bay windows again, we were along the coast now, running faster than ever. The water was blue like oil paint. The ocean looked thick and adorned with diamonds in the sun. I looked at Yammy. She wasn't any shape I had ever seen. I looked at myself, and I realized that I didn't remember who I was. Just a vague dirtiness. Like a surface cleaned bathroom. A sadness like someone crying in the apartment below you.

"Am I dead?" I asked finally.

"Yeah." Yammy said in a way that was comforting at the beginning and sad at the end.

I looked up through the ceiling again. It was getting dark. Blue and pink stars were dotting the sky and the train kept pulling us faster. It seemed like Yammy was waiting for me to talk. The way she waited didn't make me feel pressed though.

"Why don't I remember my life?" I asked finally.

"The further the train pulls you Squishies away from Earth the more of your memories you lose." She replied cheerfully, sort of bouncing in mid-air. The blue and pink dotted sky overhead twinkled as we rode on.

"You won't need most of them. We just need to make sure we find your core memories." She finished slowly.

"Core memories?" I replied, holding onto my stomach.

"Yeah, core memories. When you get to the Depot you'll need them." She said in a voice devoid of malice but saturated with weight.

"If you show up to the Depot with no core memories, you'll be scattered. So try and breathe through your life, see what you remember." She finished.

My head was buzzing. Scattered? What is a "Depot?" My brain stupidly flashed to Home Depot for a second, and I pictured some cosmic Home Depot, where they sell caulking guns for space time rips. My brain got stuck on that image of a warehouse store though. But it wasn't a Home Depot I remembered.

"I remember Sam's Club!" I shouted out loud.

She had that weird smile that I felt more than I saw again.

"Good, now breathe." She said steadily.

I closed my eyes and breathed slow deep breaths. I breathed in my name, and the names of my parents as we walked across a warehouse floor. I breathed out rows of shelves high enough a mechanical lift was needed to reach the top. I breathed an entire Sam's Club of shoppers, the smell of free samples, and brand new video game demos. I breathed that all out at once, and then I choked. It was like somebody poured dirt all over the memory, it was so clean and so simple. But somebody came and stepped on it. They peed on it, and laughed at it even. When I opened my eyes I had forgotten everything but that feeling of being stepped on.

"I can't remember." I said bitterly. I looked out at the water hoping to find some scrap of memory.

"You will," Yammy started kindly. "I won't let you get scattered!" She finished.

The train kept running along the coast, but by now we were shooting up the side of a steep cliff, getting higher and higher.

"What does scattered mean?" I asked after a while, looking out the window as both the water and the sky turned the purple of black grapes.

Yammy seemed to inhale and then said as if reading a script:

"By the time you reach the Depot your consciousness will be mostly your core memories. You'll be the most "you" you'll ever be in the last moment of your existence as this self." She paused before continuing.

"If you don't have any core memories when you are thrown in the Mixer, there won't be anything to mix you back together with." She continued as the train ran harder and faster up the cliff, there were clouds around us now.

"You're supposed to get mixed and remixed, coming back with new core memories every time. But if you're just a shell, then the pieces of you will just get scattered." She concluded.

I thought of an empty peanut in a grinder being torn apart.

“Help me find my core memories.” I said finally.

The train punched through a layer of clouds and exploded out into the upper atmosphere. Brilliant fractals of ice crystals in every color floated around us. We weren't on rails anymore I noticed, and the train's wheels were whirling circles of light. We pulled even faster.

"Just follow your nose, follow that stink and you’ll find your memories." Said a voice from behind me, shaking with laughter.

I turned around and what I saw was strange. Whenever I blinked my eyes he was different. A beautiful older boy with dark brown skin and sharp cheekbones in basketball shorts and dirty tank top, then a bull with its eyes on fire, then a scream with a body if you can imagine that, a floating spasm of sinew and ligaments. He kept appearing as a tree with a wicked face carved into it, ash dripping from its jagged mouth. He felt familiar.

"Wrong. He's gonna be remixed with all the best parts of him!" Yammy shot back with cold fury.

"Yeah!" I yelled at the strange thing too. Not knowing why but feeling a strong need to stand with Yammy.

That Thing grinned it's horrible smile before continuing.

"Nah, this Squishy is too fucking gross to get mixed. He’ll stink the whole Mixer up." Yammy seemed to be vibrating with anger. That kind of mad that made you wanna cry.

"Squishies, why do you keep saying that?" I asked in a tone that was tougher than I felt.

He considered me sincerely for a moment before answering.

"Cause you're soft." He said almost kindly. "But that just makes me wanna tear you up until you're nothing but soup." He finished with a wicked grin.

All of a sudden his head was a wet cardboard box torn open violently, spoiled meat rotting in the exit wound of his mouth. When he spoke it sounded like something being skinned or gutted. He made me feel violated, just by being near me.

"I wanna grind all of you up until it's nothing but a universe of hot soup." He spat angrily, and his voice shook the train car, popping the bubble canopy overhead.

Cold air rushed in and I gripped the nearby seat to keep from being sucked out by the vacuum.

I instinctively turned to check on Yammy and it seemed like she was getting smaller and smaller as the shape of her light was getting fuzzier. She reminded me of something. Some type of light that used to mean something.

I closed my eyes against the rushing wind and breathed.

I breathed out the memory of a space heater. I breathed out the milky light of a television in a dark room. Starfox 64 on the screen. The light of the TV felt like a bath. The blanket over me felt like my own domesticated cloud. Everything was soft. Everything was clean. I looked up and realized I was in a diorama of sorts. There was no roof to this memory, and peering over the edge of it was Him. He poured dirt all over me and my memory trying to bury the light along with me.

Everything was dirty, but I remembered what that light felt like. The light made me feel like I could sit next to someone without leaving a stain.

I opened my eyes.

"I remember playing video games as a kid in the living room with the lights off!" I shouted.

Yammy instantly regained her luminescence and color.

"Yes!" She shouted, bouncing around excitedly in the roaring wind. The train had pulled us even higher now into low orbit. The bubble canopy was sealing itself and Yammy had changed. She was sometimes still a changing shape of lightning and Jell-O, but sometimes she was a stencil. Like a neon sign in the shape of a familiar person.

"That must be a time that meant something." She said smugly, turning back to That Thing.

He had shifted back to the form of a beautiful boy. I noticed I had shifted too. I didn't realize it before, but my body was in black and white while everything around me was in color. I was in color now too.

He grimaced, and then he disappeared.

The train tugged along faster, swinging us past the moon. The big bay windows were filled up with the moon's surface.

"Who was that guy?" I finally asked, pulling my eyes away from the cliffs and peaks in front of me.

"He's something you carry." Yammy answered grimly. "But he's not the only thing." She finished, turning to me with her neon sign stencil smile.

I smiled back but I was bothered by something. Well, a lot of things at this point I guess. The train picked up speed as we pulled away from the moon and through the solar system.

"Do you remember how you died?" Yammy asked, breaking the silence as we shot past Mars, a cloud of red dust caking the windows. It felt like being inside of a lamp shade.

"No." I replied truthfully. "I don't even remember my name." I admitted with a sigh.

"That happens a lot." She said bracingly. "You know, if I had hands I'd plop one on your shoulder and tell you you're doing a good job kid." She finished in a pseudo little league coach demeanor.

"Hey, why do I remember certain things like, what a little league coach sounds like, but not stuff about my life?" I asked, sitting down in a window seat as we rounded Jupiter.

"Wouldn't that be a core memory?" I questioned.

"It's weird, we call memories like those stains. Language, math, stuff that you Squishies learn that becomes kinda stuck on you. But not really part of you." She answered, taking up space next to me in the seat looking out of the now clear window into space.

I thought about how He had used the word squishy.

"You know, I don't know if I like the term squishy. Can we not say it?" I asked, turning from the window and looking at her.

She paused for a second and it was like something clicked for her.

"Yeah, I don't think I like it either." She replied slowly.

We rode for a few hours as the train pulled us through the solar system. We passed the time by playing a cosmic game of I Spy as we reached the outer planets. We both looked back out of the window as Saturn filled our view.

"You're going to get your name back. You're going to get your core memories back. And I'm going to help." Yammy said firmly.

The train jumped even faster now as we roared towards the gas giant. It started shaking violently all of a sudden throwing us around the car. The bubble canopy shimmered in protest but remained solid. The train shook again in response to the velocity.

"We keep going faster." I said to Yammy as I adjusted myself. The train seemed to be shaking more and more.

"It's only going to get faster and weirder!" She yelled as the shaking got louder. Saturn was the window seat view on the row across from me now. From over the north pole of the planet though, a hand large as Saturn itself crept from the shadow of space.

“Listen, whatever happens next you need to breathe.” Yammy said as I stared in fear at the hand. “Breathe.”

The hand was like solid television static. There is no sound in space, but it made a sound. It was the sound of a lawnmower running over a root but refusing to stop. The sound of it shook the very rings of the planet loose and they scattered in all directions.

I had a moment to be mesmerized before the hand crushed Saturn in its grip, the gas exploding at us before we could react. An infinite amount of jeweled particulates rolling over the train like an avalanche.

All of a sudden we were a train running full speed blind through a sandstorm. The scraps of Saturn floating all around us as the emergency lights of the train turned on.

It was a cloudy darkness all around as the train steadied itself, still picking up speed. I called out to Yammy but I couldn't see or hear her.

From inside of my body I heard a voice.

"Hey." It said, the sound of it was odd. It sounded like me, but submerged under something damp and dank. Like someone had forcefully wrapped a mildewed towel around my mouth.

"I can show you everything you've forgotten, you know? It wouldn't be hard, that way you don't have to worry about it when you get to the Depot." It continued. The way it spoke to me made me wrinkle my nose like I smelled something putrid.

I tried to say no, but it felt like there was mildew spreading through my lungs. I hugged myself tight and rubbed my arms as hard as I could, but it felt like there was something gross sliding all over my body, marking me as unclean and vulgar. I felt waves of stench emanating off of me as I tried to rub myself clean.

"Let me help you remember." The voice said simply.

It felt like my brain exploded in a firework of trash. I was throwing up memories all over me. I vomited all over myself, and in my pool of sickness I saw my life reflected like the sky over a lake. I saw myself and another neighborhood boy. We were being led into a bedroom by someone we looked up to. I saw all the times he protected us. All the things he taught us about being boys. All the ways we trusted him. I saw the door close and lock behind us. I felt what happened next more than I saw it.

"See, these are your real core memories, kid." I heard the voice say, except this time it was outside of me.

It was Him again. That Thing. He took the form of what I imagined my older brother would look like. He looked like me, but strong in all the ways I saw myself as flawed. Except His teeth. They were saw blades in an ugly barbed mesh of braces.

I tried to stare Him right in the eye but it felt like I was getting filthier by the second. I started breathing fast and shallow as He took a step closer to me. Up and down. My chest was going to tear my whole body apart with how fast it was moving. He took another step. My skin felt like it was a quilt of dried cicada shells about to crumble. I stumbled backwards onto the ground.

He stood directly over me. I felt like I was underneath a rotted derelict tower. His skin was made of rust, and from the cracks of it He leaked some dirty viscous liquid.

If a drop of it touched me I knew I could never scrub it off.

He smiled, but not just with his horrible bladed teeth. But in the same way Yammy did.

Inside of me, there was a scream being stared into silence by a thousand laughing eyes, and held down by a hundred cackling hands. I closed my eyes and wondered where Yammy was. I wondered where my parents were. And then I saw them.

I saw them in my head, but they were kindergarten crayon pictures. We were a messy crayon family of uneven lines. The smiles were crooked, and they spilled outside the lines of the faces. There was a sky there, and it was so blue and clean to me. It looked like it had been colored in, extra hard. The three of us were floating on a construction paper sky holding hands. We were just circles and squares with triangles for hands. All the triangle points were doing their best to connect. It was a new shape that we were trying to make. I think that's what a family is.

All of a sudden the car was illuminated by a bright light and Yammy reappeared standing between me and Him.

She stood facing Him, and she had a body of sorts now. Like gentle lightning cracking into the shape of limbs. From her back were two wings. They were wet and stuck to her though. Like a butterfly that wasn't all the way finished.

"You keep trying to make him feel too dirty to go on." She said shaking with anger, the lightning she was made of intensifying. "That's all you know how to do."

"He feels that on his own." That Thing replied in a serious tone. “That’s what’s really at his core. Dirt.”

Yammy stayed silent for a moment as the train picked up speed.

“Is that what you feel?” She finally asked me, still resolutely staring him down.

I sat there with my head down, looking down at the floor, down at my feet, away from Yammy, away from That Thing, just away after a while.

“Sometimes, yeah.” I replied quietly.

I tried to stay quiet, but something in me was leaking. There was a water balloon inside of me with holes in it. I was trying to plug them with my fingers but there was a whole ocean in the balloon.

“All the time Yammy,” I began my voice breaking. “I feel like I’m so gross that everyone has to hold their breath around me to keep from puking.” I finished.

I didn’t have all of my memories, but I knew it was the truest thing I ever said.

For the first time Yammy turned around.

“Don’t fucking walk away from me!” He shouted, but He remained still.

Yammy knelt down in front of me.

“I’m not holding my breath.” She said simply holding out a hand. “And you shouldn’t be either.”

I realized I was holding my breath. I realized I had been holding my breath, and tensing my shoulders for a long time.

“Sometimes it feels like if I exhale too hard, it’ll all come out, and it’ll get all over everyone.” I said, wanting desperately to take her hand although I was unable to find the strength to do so.

She smiled again. It was that smile I felt on the inside again more than I saw.

“That’s okay. It’s just dirt.” She said firmly.

I looked up at her for the first time. Her face made my brain burst into a collage of beautiful memories. Days on the beach with my friends that turned into silly nights of renaming the stars, Monopoly games with my parents where my Dad would cheat and take three hundred dollars when passing Go, staying up late with my favorite cousins to watch Inuyasha, an entire Saturday afternoon with a strategy guide cracked open and the determination to finally beat Ganondorf.

I smiled back and grabbed her hand.

The lightning in her coursed through me it felt like. And for the first time, the dirt that I carried deep in the pit of my stomach felt less like dirt, and more like coal fueling a fire.

Yammy helped me up, and then stepped aside as I faced Him.

I took a step closer as He took a step back. I took another step, and He stumbled backwards onto the floor. I stood over Him, and for the first time He was silent. He almost looked afraid.

“Dirty things have happened, yeah. But it hasn’t been all dirt. That’s just all you want to remember.” I said looking down at Him. And then, I held my hand out.

“Maybe one day, you’ll be able to see that too.” I finished with a smile.

He tried to glare at me with disdain, but whether He meant to or not, He just started crying tears of mud instead before disappearing. The train accelerated again, this time zooming us past the outer planets and deeper into space. I smiled at Yammy, she smiled at me, and then we both gazed out the window at the wonders around us.

Our journey continued on like this for what felt like years. We traveled through space on The Train collecting memories, each time encountering That Thing. Each time I had to teach myself how to breathe. The Train only ran faster and faster until eventually we were out there past the stars. There was nothing but us and The Train. That Thing popped up more and more until eventually He never left. He always tried to convince me that the good memories I had managed to collect were false. That only He and what He could show me was real. After a while though, I got so used to breathing that I learned how to do it without trying. He would do things like use the emptiness of space as a projector for all my worst moments. But by now The Train was moving so fast that the past couldn’t keep up. This trip may have taken a lifetime, or it may have taken a day. It’s hard to say. We got to The Depot and I had this weird feeling that no time had passed at all.

The Depot was in this place past the no-star zone. You know how they say the universe is expanding out from the Big Bang? Well, it felt like we had outrun the corners of space expanding out. Behind us I could see the universe still creating itself trying to catch up. The nothing in front of us wasn’t dark or scary though. It was the only place in the universe without matter, so nothing mattered. Possibilities felt endless.

Feeling The Train stop may have been the weirdest experience of them all though. It slowed down with a soft purr, the wheels started to dim, the bubble canopy popped, across every car a series of rhythmic pops, The Train itself seemed to exhale before settling to rest.

The Depot was a small but cozy old west style train station. The three of us disembarked. We watched the universe edge closer to us on the horizon. I looked over at Him. He looked just like me now, but tired and weary. Any other form He took would collapse into a pile of dirt at my feet every time. He tried to glare at me in the eye. But I just thought He looked sad.

Yammy looked amazing though. Her laser stencil form had been evolving every time I recovered a core memory. She looked like an Aurora borealis in the shape of a friendly young woman. Water without a container is the best way I can describe how she looked. From her back six gossamer wings had grown.

"Well, this is it." She said with a smile I could see, gesturing towards the entrance to The Depot.

"Yeah." I replied with a nervous smile back, reaching my hand out to the door handle.

That Thing remained silent and recalcitrant, but reluctantly followed as I pushed the door open.

I was in for another surprise after we walked in.

Judging from the outside, I had expected a small rustic dusty little train station. What we encountered was something else entirely.

We were standing, but there wasn't a floor, just an endless expanse of space beneath and above and all around.

"Whoa." I said out loud, and in the instant I said that, the entire universe seemed to reverberate and echo the word back. It came back to me in different tones, languages, pitches, and tempos. I stood there listening to the word "whoa" be repeated back to me in every way possible. I had stood there listening to my own voice for so long that many of the stars had gone out. I came to understand a lot in that time. And as the last echo faded, I remembered my name.

Yammy smiled at me, and I smiled back. I turned to look at That Thing. The noises had frightened Him, His eyes darting back and forth in panic as the echoes of my voice made me feel more at home in my body. He was getting smaller and smaller with each echo. I had begun to feel sorry for him. For whatever reason I wanted to reach out a hand to comfort him. But by the time I thought to do so, he had gotten so small I couldn't see him anymore. Yammy and I started walking side by side in a peaceful silence across the universe. Eventually, we reached The Mixer.

"Wow." I said, and this time thankfully I didn't have to listen to an entire cosmos echo it back.

"Yeah, it's pretty cool isn't it?" She replied with a sort of smugness.

It was like we were on a ledge or a cliff. And below us was a vast hurricane of color and light, churning and turning on itself wildly. In it, I saw stars being born ,and then collapsing into black holes before I could take a full cycle of breath. In the eye of it there was something bright. So bright I had to look away.

"That's The Mixer?!" I asked in shock, turning to Yammy.

"Yeah, I thought I told you it mixes you up." She replied nonchalantly with a shrug. Now that she had a body I noticed she really liked shrugging.

"You undersold it a little bit." I said with a laugh.

She looked me in the eyes and had a bit of a sad smile."I think it's better as a surprise." She said simply. "So. Doing this or what?" She finished.

I looked back at The Mixer. I thought about all the stuff that thing had told me. How my next life might not be different. How it might just be another dirty life. How I might just be a dirty soul. I breathed in deep, one last time.

"Whatever I hold onto is what the universe is gonna remake me with right?" I said finally, not taking my eyes off of the storm below.

"That's right." Yammy said quietly.

"Then I want to hold onto this feeling." I replied with a smile looking at her. "After traveling across the universe I still don't feel clean Yammy. But it’s just dirt, right?"

"Right!" She answered cheerfully.

With that answer I took a step towards the ledge.

"Can I ask you something before I go?" I asked, turning to face her, my back towards The Mixer. "How come you let me call you Yammy when your name is Tammy?"

"That's a good question Amal." She pondered seriously with a hand on her hip. Hearing my name out loud for the first and last time felt funny. Finally she looked me in the eyes and said.

"Because you've always called me that. And it's funny to see how you get there every time."

With that, I knew it was time to go. We smiled at each other one last time, and then I deliberately fell backwards. As I got closer and closer to the storm I could feel the winds of it pulling at all the different parts of me. I saw my parents, I saw my life, I saw The Train, I saw Yammy. I turned around in mid-air looking directly into the storm as it rapidly approached. And then I saw something else. That bright light. In the eye of the storm, I saw who I really was.

"Huh," I remarked. "I'm pretty freaking cool."

I felt really clean.

I smiled myself awake

and everything was gold

for a second. Sunlight poured

through these big bay windows

as a forest whizzed by. At this speed

the trees were a watercolor painting of green.

I had been on a train before.

But I had never been on this train.

I wasn't mad, but I was very confused.

I didn’t remember how I got here at all.

Okay think, do you remember what you did yesterday? I thought.

I struggled for a second to remember.

Oh yeah. I thought, and a flood of my life washed through me. Most of it washed away but a lot of key moments stuck. I smiled.

The last thing I remembered was laying down. I had been sleeping alone for the past few months now but it still took some getting used to. I reached over to the other side of the bed. The soft moonlight coming through the window made my wedding band shine a bit. I let my hand rest on that spot, I tried to press down, make it as heavy as I could. I wasn’t quite used to how weightless a bed can be. My grandkids had been the best about it though. They were always checking in on me. I looked at a picture of me and my partner on a cruise to Nassau. I smiled and a strange heavy sleep sort of took me.

“Oh shit I’m dead.” I said out loud with a laugh. For the first time I looked up, and saw there was no roof to this car. There was only a beautiful bubble shimmering in the sunlight. I stepped under the rays as they melted over me in all sorts of sherbet hues.

"I feel like I'm in a kaleidoscope." I said out loud to no one.

"Oooh that's a cool description." Said a cheerful voice from behind me.

I turned around and saw something I could only describe as a triangle morphing into a circle. It didn't have a face but somehow it was smiling at me. It was made out of lightning, but also Jell-O?

"My name is-" it began before pausing. "Actually, do you remember your name?" It finished, changing course.

I looked out of the windows as the train rushed through beautiful meadows and hills. There was a super bloom of wildflowers all around.

Everything here was a kaleidoscope it seems.

"No." I answered slowly. And then I smiled at the creature floating before me.

"But I feel like you're here to help me with that." I finished with my hands on my hips.

It's odd. This creature didn't have a face to smile with, but still. There was a smile spreading somewhere between us.

The Train pulled faster as the adventure of a lifetime began.