Lizzy Burnam 🐞

Alden Harris boarded the train, heading south and north and up and away all at the same time. As if in a drunken haze, he sat and then stood again, hovering over his seat which was also a broomstick which was also an elevator. Sometimes he could feel the wheels move, grinding against his feet. Other times, he felt sand. Stone. Mud. A window cracked and let ambulance sirens in, physical manifestations of the sound, something like small ferrets whipping their tails sporadically. They slithered against Alden’s ankles, clammy and disjointed. He retched. 

He left his luggage on the platform, intentionally. It was never necessary, any of it. None of the clothes, all paint-spattered t-shirts and faded denim jeans, not the gold wedding band, not the cellphone, still buzzing with fifteen missed calls. All he needed to do was sit and wait for his stop. His do-over. Everyone boards the train fantasizing about their do-over. 

With his forehead pressed against the window, Alden realized the sun was not shining. The sun was not shining because the sun would never shine there, never has. Alden realized this the third night after he boarded, the sky still an ambiguous gray. Frantically, he asked the young woman in the seat across from him, her thin, freckled arms poking brokenly out of her black flapper dress, he said: “Why is there no sun? Or moon? Is it day or night? How long have I been here?” 

She answered in a starlet voice. “No days, no nights, they don’t matter here. They were never necessary, any of it.” Doris was her name, although she’d long forgotten it. The train had a way of making people’s memories leak, so that the air was heavy with swirling bits of thought, falling on all the passengers’ heads like dust. Doris called it fairy dust. She breathed it in by accident once, the memories rolling in her head like fragments of a dream, and eventually she started snorting it, licking it off of her arms, anything to fix her mind. The addiction tore holes in her very existence, slowly hollowing her out, and eventually, she forgot even the destination of which she once dreamed, the do-over of which she was certain. 

Somewhere, Alden could hear the heels of her tap-dancing shoes, still clicking. 

“She’ll be on this train forever,” said Alonzo, the stocky, sleepy-looking Italian man from the 18th century. Alden knew he could not speak italian, but somehow he connected with the language Alonzo spoke, felt the words, and understood them. Alonzo chewed the inside of his cheek and smacked his lips, a nervous habit he could not dispose of. The sound echoed through the train, something like a gunshot and the high voice of a flute. The sirens shuddered. 

“Is it hurting her?” Alden asked. “The… the stuff she’s breathing?” Doris’s eyes, the bright blue in them nearly invisible behind her dilated pupils, fluttered and drooped. Her short blonde curls stuck up, swaying in the thick, colorful air, and she weakly smoothed them back down against her temples. 

“Eh, not hurting, not helping.” Alonzo shrugged. His mustache moved like a tiny dark worm while he masticated the inside of his cheek. He sneezed, and then looked ashamed, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Although, she doesn’t dance anymore, not like she used to….” 

“It’s dissolving her!” a lanky man in a lab coat cut in, breathless. On his chest, a nametag read A. McAddams, PhD. He quickly ran his fingers, smudged gray with pencil lead, through his wild hair. It floated and vibrated around his head, as if being pulled upward by a magnet. He spoke fast, his words building as if always on the verge of a breakthrough. “Loosening bits and pieces from… from her soul, or from her essence, her being, her…. it’s diluting her into the air around us, almost, she’s becoming a part of the air, a part of the train….”
“… Some days, she remembers and tries to dance again,” Alonzo mumbles slowly, his deep voice shaking. “But she lost her shoes, and she can’t dance without her shoes.” 

Everyone saw the memory then, poking at the lapels of Alonzo’s brown waistcoat. A cloud of Doris, sweat pouring off of her pale skin, the frills of her dress trembling. Her shoes shatter, scattering across the floor. The other passengers all scramble to catch the pieces, but just as their fingers reach the shiny black leather, it turns to dust. Doris, in an effort to save them, trips over her own feet and falls, falls, falls. She lands hard and grabs her face, tugging on her lips, her ears, her cheeks. In the memory, Alonzo jumps up to help her, but she is screaming, her body twitching, all of her colors flickering on and off. 

  “Very strange,” said the doctor, shuffling through piles of notes as tall as his knees. He scratched his head, breathing hard through his nose. 

“Very sad,” Alonzo sighed.

Doris giggled, her eyes suddenly pinned on Alden’s. “You look like my fiance,” she sighed, crossing her legs. “He was a soldier.”

 Alonzo and the doctor shifted uncomfortably in their seats. 

“He used to tie my shoes for me, before every dance.” Doris smiled and wiggled her bare toes, the nails of which were painted bright red. “‘Cause if I did it, they’d always come untied.” 

“It’s… it’s good you had him, then,” Alden stuttered, wondering how to be polite in a situation like this. 

“Well, I never really had him, not really….” Doris rolled her head back and forth, as if trying to get rid of a knot in her neck. One of the straps to her dress slipped down her shoulder. “… And my father was a butcher I was the all-star athlete at St. John’s Penitentiary My mother was God He left the stove on The first time I saw her kill a butterfly….”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” Alonzo said, pulling a handkerchief from his breast pocket. He leaned heavily on his cane to stand up and shuffle to the seat next to Doris, interrupting her vocal reverie. He patted her face with the handkerchief, shushing her, and her voice began to fade in and out of Alden’s hearing range, still spewing nonsense. 

“…My husband beat me My sister showed me when I was thirteen years old in the candy shop my teeth still stuck in a Charleston Chew He told me he liked her better so I pulled the ribbon out of her braids….”

“What’s happening?” Alden asked. He shrunk back into his seat, thinking maybe it was his fault. “What is she saying?”

“It’s the dust,” Alonzo explained. He pulled off his jacket in order to bunch it up into a makeshift pillow for Doris, lifting her head to place the pillow beneath it. Alonzo had a gentleness about him that made him seem less like the sturdy, intimidating man that he was and more like a tiny, female nurse. His large, calloused fingers pressed softly against Doris’s temples. “It makes her mad, makes her…. She can no longer remember which of her memories are real and which are dreams, leftovers from previous passengers.” 

Doris fell asleep then, her lips still moving. She had a small mouth and full, red lips, like a rosebud beneath her nose. The sirens, sensing the distress too late, scuttled over to her, screeching near her ankles. Alonzo kicked at them, cursing. 

“A siren is a sound,” Alden said, dazed. “Not a… uh, an animal….”

“A siren can also be a mermaid,” the doctor chimed in, not looking up from his papers. “Or a family of aquatic salamanders, the sirenidae. But nothing is familiar here, nothing is right…. nothing is…. it’s not like the world outside of the train station, a sound is a snake, a dream is a drug, it’s all so strange….”

“Yes, well…” Alonzo grumbled. If Alonzo were the type of man who was easily annoyed, he might’ve almost looked irritated then, with the doctor’s constant surges of ideas. “You’ll get used to it, Alden.”

“How do you…?” Alden almost laughed. “How do you know my name?” 

“Well, how do you know my name?” 

Alden blinked. He did know Alonzo’s name. He also knew Dr. McAddams’s name, and Doris’s name, and the dark-skinned woman in the corner who never spoke and seemed to exist only in fuzzy lines and dull colors, her name was Ichtaca, and the American children, Gabe and Sabrina, who sat on the floor around a plump woman named Yanyu to listen to her stories. He knew that nobody knew the conductor’s name, but that his voice was somehow both rough and musical, and that when he speaks, the dust settles and the doors open up to let more people on. He knew that there was a service attendant named Damon with one arm who would sometimes walk through their car, selling lost keys, broken flip flops, baby teeth. He knew that nobody ever bought anything from Damon. He knew that Damon grew up in Alden’s hometown of Ipswich, three hundred and forty-seven years after Alden was born. 

In light of all of this, it was no fault of Alden’s when he fainted, really. It was not a sign of his sensitive nature or anything like that, although he did tend to get squeamish around needles. Everyone fainted shortly after they first boarded the train, even Alonzo, who tried to pretend that he just fell asleep. Ichtaca, too, although Alden could not imagine her doing anything aside from glaring stoically at the wall. The doctor had it the worst; he passed out or vomited every time Doris tapped her toes or the children laughed and tugged on each other’s hair. 

“Wake up, Al,” Doris giggled over the sirens. Alden recognized the animated voice through his haze, red spots swirling behind his eyelids. Doris was crouched over Alden’s head, poking at him. 

“I thought my nickname was Al,” Alonzo protested, pouting playfully. 

“You’re both Al, Al!” Doris squealed and then burst into a fit of laughter, as if someone were tickling her. She ran a finger through the dust on the floor and then popped it into her mouth, rubbing it hard against her gums.