"Arrival"

(Note: I'm trying something new--a short story, "Arrival," written in installments and published online. I can't promise that I'll sustain the early momentum and keep it going, nor that the end product will even remotely resemble a self-contained and coherent narrative. But we'll give it a try.)

Arrival

1.
    He felt the great locomotive throbbing below him, reverberating through the sidewalk, through the thinning soles of his brogans and into his body where it coursed about him, as real as the blood in his veins or the nerve impulses firing across countless synapses. He could still feel the train rocking back and forth on unstable tracks as it slowed in its approach to the station, shrieking shrilly as it blindly negotiated the gentle bend into the platforms and finally came to a stop and the conductor announced over the loudspeaker that all passengers were to disembark at once. The end of the line had been reached.
    The train’s end of the line. His beginning.
    He now missed the train’s lulling rythym, its comforting embrace, even as he walked briskly at street level in moderately eager anticipation of his destination. The train got him most of the way and tapped most of his money, leaving him a ways still to go and without the fare for a cab or even the streetcar. But he was young, fit, and eager, and a three mile walk after riding all this way meant nothing to him.
    His morning’s breakfast and his mother’s anxious farewell were already fading in his memory. He was unsure when he would be seeing either again.

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