Seconds

Your eyelids flutter as your vision clears. Blurry shapes of muted colors become a dim and empty train car. The seats are old and worn, and the car feels dark and cramped. You sway gently from side to side, and feel that you are in a moving vessel. A light source is coming from the side. You sluggishly lift your head and turn toward it. It's a window.

In the window, you can see a landscape devoid of human touch. Overgrown grasses, trees, and occasional creeks are rushing past your line of sight. You idly wonder where you are and how you got here. A rhythmic, distant clacking provides the soundtrack for this moving scenery.

You sit up and stretch your legs and arms with effort. You attempt to rub the grogginess from your face. You notice that you're in your pajamas. "So what?" says your heart, even though your head thinks you should be panicked, embarrassed, and seeking escape. Even if you wanted to move, every inch of muscle feels stiff, so it would be a struggle. It's better to relax and enjoy the ride for now.

But you can't enjoy the ride. It's not because of fear; panic is absent. All emotion is absent.

As you gaze out the window, you witness a peculiar phenomenon. The grass, trees, clouds, and other elements have morphed into people. All of them are either people you know dearly or people you have never met before, and all of them are larger than real people, allowing you a clear glimpse of their eyes and facial expressions. They are upset with you. They are yelling angrily, or crying, or any number of adverse reactions. As you watch them, you realize that the people you know are reenacting scenes from your life—memories—and the people you don't know are playing on your fears and insecurities.

You lazily gaze at them from the safety of the train car. You feel nothing.

A brief howl of brutal noise and then the metallic slam of a door murders the air. This is followed by a booming voice that calls, "Tickets! Tickets! Please have all tickets out on display!" The tinny, rapid squeaks of a hole puncher being repeatedly squeezed accompanies the voice.

You can't see the conductor because he's behind you. You hear his heavy footsteps in the empty air and the repetitive call for "Tickets! Tickets!" He pauses for a moment and you hear the hole puncher pierce paper. You wonder if there's someone sitting in a seat behind you, but you don't turn around to look, because it doesn't matter.

The footsteps and booming voice come closer until finally, he is beside you. "Where's your ticket?" he demands from you as he impatiently squeezes and releases his hole puncher, eager to pierce.

Your mouth feels dryer than you think it should. "I don't have one," you manage to mutter.

"You're not even going to check?"

You humor him by checking your person for any pockets or places where you might have stuffed a ticket and forgotten about it. Maybe this is like that movie where the kid boards a magic train and finds a ticket in his pocket, whatever it was called.

"I don't have one," you repeat after checking.

He offers to sell you a ticket on the train with a surcharge, but you didn't find any cash on yourself, either.

He looks cross. "Well, you can't ride the train without a ticket, so I'm going to have to boot you off at the next stop."

"Ok," you respond compliantly. You don't even know how you got here, or where you're going. You didn't ask to be here.

He walks away, vanishing into the next train car with another howl of noise and thud of the metal door that connects them. You look back out the window. The train shows no sign of stopping. You wonder how long it will be until the next stop, where you were told to disembark.

The scenery has changed, so that now you're seeing memories of last winter, and the winter before that, and the one before that. You see past summers, springs, and autumns. You see the same people you loved and the hard times you endured. They're appearing and disappearing in the sky as quickly as the train is moving forward. You think that you should feel joy, anger, or grief, but you don't. You feel nothing.

Gazing longer still, you see your dreams for the future. You see yourself holding hands with a partner as you both grow old, you see that thing you really wish you could afford as it sits in your home or property. The train shows no sign of stopping. It all passes by in a matter of seconds. You feel nothing.

In the trees and foliage, you spy depictions of your everyday worries. The pictures are becoming more vivid. The colors swirl in and out of one another as images of the activities and ideas that inspire the most dread in you float by. But they are outside of the car, on the other side of the window glass, and cannot enter. So you feel nothing.

Faintly, on the horizon, you think you can make out scenes from your childhood. You see the toys you loved and the school you went to. You can almost hear the songs whose melodies and lyrics you still remember, even though no actual sound from the outside can get in.

You're beginning to feel something...

You feel old.

You sigh with disapproval. "It doesn't matter," a voice inside you says. You don't know where it came from.

The silence is murdered yet again, this time by frantic screams and yelps from one person. "The train isn't stopping! It's a runaway train! We have to stop it! Please! I don't want to die like this!!"

A voice in your mind says, "I need to get out of here." For the first time, you stand up from your seat. It takes some effort, and you stretch again. But after that, you move into the aisle.

The person rushes toward you and lays his hands on your body, threatening to knock you off balance. "It's a runaway train! A runaway train!!" he cries. He is actually crying.

You swiftly detach yourself from him and reach for the door that the conductor had previously exited through.

All of your senses are pummeled by noise and the reality that you are stepping out of the car and onto the connector that holds two cars together. The rhythmic clacking is no longer distant, but piercing through you like the hole puncher through the ticket. You look down, where the train tracks whiz by in a blur, and just above them your foot wobbles on the connector that sways with the motion of the train. And you hear your name being called from the outside, in vocal tones varying from love to excitement to scolding. The shock wave paralyzes you for a split second. You can feel everything.

But the crazy man from behind you is going to grab you and beg you again; you can hear him. So you instinctively reach for the door to the next car, open it, and hurl yourself in. Once your feet are firmly planted on its floor, the door slams behind you, and everything is gone. The sounds, fear, and crazy man. All gone. The new car is as dark and empty as the old one. All is as it should be. You feel nothing.

A woman begins to cry. No, it isn't crying; she's wailing. It comes from deep in her belly, from the same place where a scream of terror or orgasmic ecstasy might come from. You look in the direction of the wailing. She's the only passenger you can see, and she's sitting alone, with her head bent down to her knees and a phone by her head. She's holding the phone away from her face, and you can see the timer on the screen underneath a name, indicating that she is on a call.

"I need to get out of here," the voice in your head says again.

So you repeat your previous actions, over and over. In the next car, there's a couple making love, with no regard for privacy. In the car after that, there are children without parents who laugh, scream, whine, and beg you for attention. In the next is a raging man wielding a bat with nails sticking out of it. Although he's flailing it around, you catch sight of some blood on it, as if it's been used.

It goes on and on, and the whole time, the windows display what you should be feeling but cannot feel. You just know intuitively that you don't want to be in the same car as any of those people.

But the next time you want to move to the next car, the door has a sign on it that reads, "Staff Only."

You open the door anyway.

You step inside the control room, where you are greeted by large front-facing windows and a clear view of the train's path. The door slams shut behind you. The room is empty. There's no one here to control the train. That makes sense.

With this head-on view, you have a new perspective on just how fast the train is moving. Everything rushes by so quickly. With each second that passes, you get a clear view of the changing landscape. You see wildflowers scattered in the field to your left. You see the kiss you missed out on when you were in high school. You see the job you should have taken and the one you shouldn't have left behind. You see a cloud that looks kind of like a duck. You see the person you never got to say goodbye to. You see a red light. You feel nothing. It's all on the outside and it can't come in.

You see the trees and bushes disappear from your peripheral vision as quickly as they approach you. They are playing scenes from your favorite TV shows and movies within their leaves. The people you shared them with are trying to talk to you in the clouds, but you can't see voices. You see train tracks being eaten up by the nose of the train. There is a second set of tracks running parallel to yours. You see another red light. You see another train. Its headlights are approaching you faster than anything else.

"That's strange," says the voice inside you.

Now the colors of the landscape are only showing the possible outcomes of this scenario. You think that perhaps you should try to find a way to move to the other track. But you still feel nothing. You just think you ought to do something because you're the only one in the control room.

You have seconds to react. You begin to press buttons, turn knobs, and push levers with no sense of urgency.

While fiddling with the controls, the voice in your head—perhaps it's been your own voice this whole time—is wondering, "Is it possible for me to save this train, or will we crash? Is it so bad if we crash? Will I feel it?"

You long to feel something, something more than the fleeting cacophony found between the cars.

"Will I feel my bones crack from the weight of the impact? Will I feel the burn of flames on my skin? Will the voices that call my name pierce through my core as though it is paper? Will I feel my soul lea-"

...

Your eyelids flutter as your vision clears. Blurry shapes of muted colors become your room, where you are lying in your bed. You quickly sit up and look around, feeling bewildered.

You catch sight of a piece of paper on your pillow. It's a ticket.

The ticket says Second Chance Railway at the top. You feel emotion prickle your skin as you read the destination printed below it. It's a ticket to that chance you missed when life ran away with you.