Changing Trains

I used to ride the train from school to home and back, every other weekend, in an old Pullman car built in the nineteen-thirties. It smelled like my grandma’s house— a little musty, like time had curled up and fallen asleep in the cushions. Too warm, always, but the clickety-clack over tie bars and rail frogs lulled me to sleep, rocking me gently as if the train remembered being a cradle. We changed trains in Omaha— an hour or two to wait under chandeliers that looked like upside-down rockets, pendulum-lights humming above the checkerboard floor. I’d find a quiet bench beneath the soaring windows, crack open a paperback— sometimes Poul Anderson, sometimes Clifford Simak, and once even The Communist Manifesto— and disappear. I built fortresses out of sentences, made treaties with Martians, and explored history with comrades in red. I don’t remember what I packed for those weekends, but I remember what I read. The train always carried me somewhere else first— into other worlds, other futures, where girls could be scientists and navigate the stars. I’d arrive drowsy, half in orbit still, while the familiar streets waited without question. And then I was home.