Midnight on the Stranded Line
The rain hammered the carriage roof in a rhythm that sounded almost deliberate, as if the weather itself was tolling for something forgotten. The train coughed once, twice, then stopped on a stretch of track that offered nothing but a black throat of night and distant trees that shimmered like broken glass in the glassy surface of the windows. The clock on the wall stubbornly refused to advance beyond midnight, pausing at a moment that felt older than the rails themselves.
Onboard, the passengers shifted in their seats, counting breaths and glances, trying to remember why they had boarded in the first place. The conductor vanished as if erased by a sudden fog, leaving behind a silence so thick you could hear the powdery echo of your own heartbeat. The cabin filled with small, unsettled noises—the sigh of leather, the creak of the wagon, a distant bell that never rang for anyone living.
- The locomotive's breath came in short puffs, like a dragon dozing under the coal char and steam.
- Windows fogged with names that did not belong to any passenger you could recall.
- A timetable that never updates, offering departures to places that never existed on the rails.
- A corridor that folds when you walk, hiding the opposite door behind a curtain of shadow.
Time stretched and then leaned, as if gravity itself were bending toward a single, terrible moment. The train began to move again, though no one touched the controls, and the world outside narrowed to a black tunnel that hummed with an old memory. Faces appeared in the glass—flares of half-remembered lives, smiling faintly at you from all directions, as if the train were reviewing your choices, your chances, your chances you never took.
"We are all passengers here, waiting for a signal that never comes," whispered a voice from the seat beside you, a voice that seemed to know your name even as you forgot you had spoken it first.
In the next car, a woman kept staring into a mirror that reflected a rainstorm you had never seen, and yet felt as if it was already familiar. Her lips moved with another voice, arguing about your future and your past in the same breath, as though your life could be rewritten by the glare of a silvered pane. The lights flickered between dusk and dawn, never deciding which hour would bless or curse the moment you realized you were no longer merely traveling—you were being traveled by a memory that would not let you go.
When the slowing happened again, the air grew cold enough to frost the inside of the glass. A final, whispering warning traced itself along the window: do not listen when the tracks recite your name. If you hear it, you must choose between stepping forward into the silhouette of a door that appears where the wall should be, or staying where you are and becoming a part of the night that never ends. The Stranded Line does not exist to carry you home; it exists to carry you back to yourself, sharpened and unafraid.