afterdawn

Erin remembers the train & the tracks & the world though the thickets of trees as her last good memories before Bran's death. It seems a thousand years ago that the green veiny world was hers beyond the toxic steam from the train & Bran sat across the plush seat across from her, slightly hairy legs up on the plush seat so close she could almost smell his feet. She remembers the skirt she wore. Plump & taffeta. Red & obnoxious. Her hair brushed & blond-fluorescent against the white of her shirt. They played cards. Bran won because he cheated. She loved his cheating eyes. Dark cheating eyes & curly hair & a jaw so sturdy it survived bullets. They were seventeen then,

on the cusp of death. Because every year alive is always one year closer to death.

After playing cards forever they slept but Bran was not comfortable sleeping on a seat unoccupied by someone else, so he switched sides to borrow her shoulder.

Erin remembers the sweetness the most. The scent of his scalp, the gigantic right hand on her knee, the goosebumps they left behind around the small mole at the base of her skinny right knee. The glass compartment doors clanged together. If she screwed her eyes shut she could concentrate on the distracting breaths he blew into her ear.

Whenever the train jolted he'd kiss her neck. She did not pretend indifference. Instead her grins grew into perfect semicircles. Then lopsided. Unabashedly happy.

His arm wrapped around the small of her back. They remained like this, stitched together, for two whole hours.




They reached A---. The station was a lone platform in an ocean of overgrown trees, brambles & weeds that clung, needy, to the barbed wire fences. Two other ancient ladies left the train, their cloaks covering their dresses & the soft, pliant skins of their ankles visible in the heat. Erin could not bear to see in front of her. The air shook from the blue humidity. Bran had his arm around her & the handle of his suitcase. She could feel him already browning in the sun.

Bran offered to wait until the next train. Erin knew she had to endure the standard This is Not Forever speech. That was the worst part. So she told him to go. He would not go. They stood against the fence, waiting for the Express.

The easy thing was not so simple. She could not refuse to go. Worse, Bran stayed silent. Erin was at a loss to remember when he had ever been so quiet. He gave a subtle clutch to the chest, the only indication of this sickness of loss.

Just before the train came they heard the patter of gunfire. Quick, thick shots. Erin smashed her head against the sound of a man dying in the leaves. Head ringing, she vomited into the fence.

I can't leave you here, she sobbed, as the train finally pulled into the station. He didn't hear her.



One thousand more miles to C---.

She started that journey in tears.



Through those tears she saw that the train pounded dangerously through the coastline. The color of the trip: blue. Blinding blue in the water, softer in the sky. Eroded cliffs dipped into the turquoise shores. Though there was no one left to shoot guns, this was still the soundtrack of her imagination. Bizarrely, she was thankful. Bullets meant no Bran.

Dear Mam,

We have arrived safely at W--. No fire. Company all alive. I love you dearly. Will write again from Silver.

Tell Maria she may have whatever she wants from my drawers. Say hello to my dear Aunt. It's good you will be moving in with her. It's good that we're able to leave.

[Erin scratched out that last line. The last two lines.]

2

The world changed a day later. Erin slept through the metamorphosis. She stepped on the unfinished letter when she turned to look through the window. The land was silent, opening under the dawn.

When Erin looks back, she realizes that she never knew how to identify this rich bleakness. At first she thought it was emptiness. Too sedate to be hell. The train itself was quiet, an self-moving object that took her through space. Bran's distance became fresh grief.



Then, the train crashed


a thousand miles an hour it seemed, hurtling towards another fast-moving body of iron. It slipped off the track. Had Erin known about Bran then she would've welcomed death. Even now she knew no reluctance. The glass from the compartment door sliced her skin into pieces but she lay low, a habit of instinct, squatting through the cracks left in the injured door. She squeezed her cut-up body through the tipsy corridors, her cheek raw against the heat distortion of the walls. Her lungs were suffused with smoke. She crawled from the belly of the diseased metal animal & found herself in the softness of grass.

No one else left the wreckage. The other hulk of iron carried freight, an automated no-driver, no-human, no-soul train. The steaming accident & the smell of dying bodies stunk up the fresh heather of this meadow. She coughed into it.

As she walked through the grasses she heard the sounds of normal traffic on the road a half mile in front of her behind the moor & wondered why the roads were allowed to exist. Then

she fell into the grass. A poor-man's grave. A grave Bran might've shared.

She didn't notice the dried-blood covered ambulance hurtling through the wreckage at a million miles an hour, snorting gasoline into the grass. The weightless hands underneath her, strapping her onto a stretcher, did nothing to wake her up. Even the hardness of an industry-standard hospital bed could not cut her loose from dreaming. Not even the anesthesia could obliterate what she saw.

Somewhere she felt a deep sense of relief. Good. She had managed not to send that letter. It was not good that Mam was going to live with Aunt. She should not feel that way. Even when the world was being ripped apart by bombs that woman was more toxic than death. Even through the medicine & the attack of the scalpels and needles, Erin screamed a warning to her Mam. If she ever would listen.



You are awake, Erin heard.

Just like that, she was awake.

She sat in a box of white. The room had a door built into the wall. The light was blinding. The hardness of the mattress pinched her back. A nurse pinched at the needles stuck into her forearm. Another woman stood at the foot of her bed. Her skin was burnished and taut, a deliberately non-white thing in this sterile room. Her hair was clumped in thick parts around her shoulders, each equally susceptible to pulling the way Erin's old braids urged Bran to pull them when she sat in front of him in the elementary.

She nodded to the nurse to pull the needles out.

Register on your way out, the burnished woman said. She turned on her heels and walked out, tight skirt banging her on her calves. The nurse followed. When Erin felt her face the skin was almost healed. The pain in her arm was still significant. She found her clothes in a distended pile on a chair. She managed to leave the room, ignoring the pain in her intact face and arms. The corridors outside were too crowded, mostly with the carts of newborns the nurses pushed toward the industrial-strength metal doors. The sterility of the place bothered her. So did the linoleum. & the squeakiness of the wheels as they rubbed against the floor. Erin felt the outline of the damage to her face, even though it was still (after a second, third, fifth, hundredth exploration) fine.

At the end of the hallway the burnished woman stood there with the nurse & they both leaned against carts of these glass baby cages, filled with sleeping babies cocooned in their felt-stitched blankets. They seemed as inanimate objects. Erin watched as they stood close to the stairwell, in front of another glass-paneled door which led to the glass cribs for the newborn babies. Through the door Erin saw only empty cribs. They held them in their arms for moments before putting them back into the glass; the nurse wheeled them somewhere and the burnished woman took the stairs.

I'll get the last, the woman said, you bring its medicine.

Erin then crept closer to the glass door. Now she could see the last baby (burnished) left in its crib. She saw Bran's face in its copper one. A half-accidental-descendent of a fairer man who might never come home. Its fists crashed against its glass prison, and when she turned around to face the stairwell both women were gone, wheeling the glass cages toward the elevator.

She knew she would take that baby.

He waved to her.

His little fists jabbed into the air. He fought whatever sedative they'd given him to keep him cocooned in sleep. The others gave drugged breaths, but this one fought. Erin found his wrinkly face getting bigger and more beautiful to her the longer that she watched it.

The alarm went off as soon as she opened the door and grabbed the baby in one swoop.



She ran down the stairs. No sign of the burnished woman, though she heard the nurse roll the cart frantically toward the door from the elevator. The baby was warm in her hands & against her breast it made attempts to suckle as her heart thudded messages of caution. The baby seemed to understood, though it struggled silently on her chest thirsty for milk. Her milk. Milk that would undoubtedly, if it did flow, kill him.

Thud.

This was dangerous. She would get caught. The alarms were ringing. The cameras caught her back. She wished for her mother's thick Kashmiri cloak, a gift from her father's army friend. It would cover her. Make her into any peasant with a baby strapped around her chest for farmwork. Or a Vietnamese Straw Hat.

She heard the steps, though they were not many. It was a half-hearted chase.

When she pushed the (alarmed) door, the last door at the bottom of the interminable stairwell, the baby began to cry.