An excerpt from "Crossing Decembers"
by John Booth
genre:
Literature & Fiction
description:
Those train whistles that call over the Midwest fields at night, are, most times, just trains. Sometimes they're more. Sometimes they'll stir blood, twist the universe in on itself, flatten and re-shape reality like it's a penny lying on the rails.
Ask Josh Kendall: He finds out one December night, heading out to a far corner of Ohio to Five Mile Bridge, intent on mourning his friend Kallie, seven years gone. But a jarring message and one of those world-bending locomotives wash Josh backward in time and memory, giving him the chance to rediscover pieces of the past he thought he'd lost.
And causing him to wonder if maybe those bits can be put back into place differently.
Too late, Joshua realizes his actions are rippling through the paths of time backward as well as forward, and as his mind wrestles with pasts he cannot remember, those roads which have never existed are suddenly very real beneath his feet.
Crossing Decembers is a story of phantom trains, resurrections, and the vital pieces of life we sometimes have to pry loose like trilobites from shale before we can understand their place in the whole.
chapters
chapter 1:
an excerpt from Chapter 1 - Return
In western Ohio, there are a million miles of two-lane roads that disappear into oceans of fields at night. Kallie lost us among them until the lights of Bryan were far, far gone.
“This is Seven Mile Bridge,” she said as we drove over a paved bridge of blue-green steel girders. “We’re almost there.”
A few more turns at isolated intersections, and the road shrunk to tar and gravel before rising steeply ahead of us toward a bridge. Kallie drove on and parked us dead center.
“This is it,” she said, shutting the car off and opening her door. “Let’s go.”
The only light came from a farmhouse about a quarter-mile distant, lying in a pool of white light from a lamp on a nearby power pole.
It was dark and quiet and still.
Below us, gleaming dully under the low winter sky, a double set of train tracks beamed to the horizons.
“How often-” I began to ask, but she was already pointing to the west, where a star was growing at the edge of the world.
The train was miles away, so we got back in the car and out of the wind for a few minutes, until the dashboard was touched by the snow light of the train’s headlamp. Kallie leaned and looked toward me and then past me, a smile touching her face.
“Come on,” she said.
When we stood side by side at the bridge railing and stared at the oncoming light, my stomach knotted. I shivered, teeth clenched.
A buzz slid along the tracks for a second, sizzled through the soles of my feet, then turned into a rattle and then a humrumbling and then a pulsating chug as the light grew brighter and brighter, until I could see a funnel of heat-shimmered air above the engine. The pounding grew to a roar and the bridge began to shake, and a hundred yards from us, the train’s whistle blasted and ran along the edge of my teeth and my bones and rammed itself through my eardrums and shook my eyeballs, like a scream of those white thunderclaps in a fireworks show.
Kallie slammed her hand over mine and gave it a crushing grip against the rough wooden railing. I looked at her and hollered a whoop of joy and thrill, and then the coal desert sandstorm was on us, around us, as the engine stormed underneath.
Hot wind from a distant summer crashed over our heads in a baking wave, and looking past our feet we watched the boxcars thunder past in a blur.
“Watch!” She yelled. “Run across the bridge with it!” And she dashed the twenty feet or so to the opposite rail, where the train ran from beneath, a rushing river of steel.
When I ran to join her, I dizzied in the motion illusion, seeing the cars flying away underneath me. We whirled to run back, and the train had gone, the stillness disorienting, like the moment a rollercoaster stops back in the station, but your eyes and ears and blood are still thrashing and racing.
The tracks below vibrated, a swarm of metal-shaving bees chasing the blinking red beacon at the caboose that now receded toward Bryan.
“Well?” She asked.
I exhaled.
“You know,” I said, “I think I truly appreciate who you are.”
Wind bit, pulled me back to the present, and the train tracks below remained empty to the ends of the world.
What’s funny is I was only able to see the full picture of that bridge in its place within the landscape after Kallie was gone. When I think of that night, that first breathtaking trip, Five Mile Bridge is in isolation, folded in a foggy memory of a drive on dark, unknown roads, and it just materializes from nowhere. And up there, in the winter blackness, there are no fields or trees or anything to be seen but faraway lights.
I found a penny among a clutch of coins in my coat pocket. Someone had drawn a figure eight lying sideways over Lincoln’s face with a black marker.
Kneeling on Five Mile Bridge, I found a slot between the planks, put the penny in and let it go.
It made no sound when it landed, lost.
