Flash Fiction February - The Train Guard
This flashfic is inspired by a prompt posted on 14th February 2022 by the Writer’s Digest to include “an animal character”. This story is just over 600 words. Enjoy!
The cocker spaniel rested its chin on my knee. “So, you want to get on the train?”
“Yes, please.”
He grumbled, removing himself from my lap and coming to a rest over my sandals. “People always want to get on the train.”
“Do you know where it goes?”
“No.”
“Nobody does then.”
Around me the station was empty. A dry rain pattered on the slick concrete and over the iron tracks. The clouds moved in stark, grey clusters over a surreal, light blue sky. Beautiful, defined sunrays sliced down where the roof ended, like a privacy curtain for the short line of historical, wooden benches and closed concession stands.
“When does it get here?”
The spaniel bashed its tail on the ground once, golden hair teasing the light. “When it gets here.”
After a few moments of tense silence, he added, “You people are always impatient.”
“Have you ever been on it?”
“I’ve never needed to.”
“Has anyone… come back after they’ve gone?”
He stared up at me. If I hadn’t already gotten used to his gruff, intolerant attitude, I would have said his big, watery eyes were cute. But I got the distinct impression they were brimming with malice instead.
For a while, I thought I wasn’t going to get an answer from him either.
And then, “Most people do. But they don’t usually come back the same.”
I contemplated this, my fingers twisting on the hem of my skirt. “Does change always have to be a bad thing?”
He looked pointedly away from me, drawing half off my shoes.
Then the grumpy spaniel got to his feet. “It’s here.”
I looked down the track but saw nothing. I looked the opposite way up the track, but there was nothing there either. In fact, where the distinctive rumble of the earth and clack, clack, clack of the train wheels should have been, there was only a long stretch of silence. My eyes searched the jagged light and empty platforms, the dripping stairs and the white gravel railway but found no reward.
“I don’t see it –”
The spaniel sat behind the yellow line, tail swishing absently. He glanced back at me. “Look harder.”
And then I noticed it, the thin disturbance of light that sprung up vertically from his head. The more I stared the clearer it became. It helped, I realised after a few points of a second, to follow one line of distortion until I reached the sharp right angle of an intersection of several lines and to keep branching out from there. Eventually, a largely translucent train cart sat beside the platform, still as the face of the sun.
It looked cold, as if it had never been moving.
When I looked down its body, the other carts slowly began to fade into the sunlight, morphing into the scenery, into overgrown hedges and grass paddies and undistinguishable concrete structures and powerlines.
“Its not going to wait for you much longer,” the spaniel said, amused.
I eyed my ride a little more but rocked myself to my feet anyways. I approached slowly, as if it were a cat I didn’t want to scare away, or to attack me in a wild fit of rage.
“Should I get on it?”
“You’re eligible,” the spaniel said. “But it’s not mandatory.”
In an epiphany it occurred to me – “Does everyone get on the train?”
The spaniel smiled, wide and uncanny. I thought there was something strange about it but began to dismiss it anyway, until I realised what was wrong.
He had human teeth.
I opened my mouth to speak but he beat me.
“No,” he said, only grinning wider, eyes glued on me in some sick fixation – “Scarcely anyone makes it past the doors.”
14/02/2022
To Be Proofread . . .