Glass and Gold
The breaks squealed as the train slowly came to a stop. Today? Again? They hadn’t even been on the tracks for 30 minutes and already they were hitting their first delay. Fine. It was fine. Of course it was fine, it HAD to be fine. There was no other alternative other than for the fineness of the situation to permeate and percolate. Now silence. No noise but for the groans of the people in the train car and the low electrical hum of the car itself.
They waited. Waited for something, anything. A voice, a ring, a siren…an update. Simply any scrap of a sign of life. 10 minutes passed and at last a scraggly voice squawked through the intercom: they were stuck. In a stalemate with a technical defect down the line. Nothing was clear. They languished in the passing of the minutes. As though time itself had been soaked in molasses and was now dripping one drop at a time from the ceiling of the universe.
Oscillating between rage and a sense of calm hopelessness, they looked through the windows at the brown stale train platform taunting them outside. They were nowhere, they were nonexistent. Or were they? It wasn’t clear. Nothing was clear. Clarity was too much to ask in their predicament, and it rarely ever came in such situations. With nowhere to go but into their heads, they retreated. A terrifying proposition for some, for others a welcome reprieve from the onslaught of the physical world.
Time passed. How much? Unclear. Fuzzy. Enough to pacify and yet not enough to allow for a mutiny. The squawker returned. They came tumbling out of their cavernous mindscapes. They were turning around. Around? What? They wanted to go forward. But of course this was of no concern to the organization. The train occupants were small currency in a much larger transaction. Much easier to burn small bags of cash than bend the will of the fat men holding the ropes.
Eyes darted from corner to corner, as if searching for a solution in the confines of the stale air that surrounded them. Okay fine, turn around..but when? Again a sickeningly dull silence settled in. Suffocation seemed on their heels, yet just as the air became too heavy to breathe, the train lurched in the opposite direction. Movement. Tension released. Tempers tamped. The hum became a whine became a rumble. Backwards. Nonsense in every sense. The captive observers watched as nondescript landscapes began to swim by.
What happens to anger that is unresolved? Into what does it transmutate? Where does it go? It does not disappear, that much is certain. Much as energy cannot be destroyed, simply altered, so too does anger, improperly handled, not disappear but become something all the more insidious: resentment.
Resentment poisons the mind, shatters relationships, leaves ruins in its wake, yet often, it does this all in deafening silence. And at this moment resentment was oozing from every corner of the train car. Each passenger somehow silent and simultaneously screaming resentment at maximum volume. How come the fat men holding the bags were never to be found in the same train cars? This is why. They would be torn to shreds. Decimated. Only bones left for the wolves to pick at on some deserted platform.
But alas, the fat men sat perennially in their towers of glass and gold, counting their riches with glee. Some believed the fat men to be simply myths. Scary bedtime stories for children and justification for all the suffering of those at the whims of the train car. But they were as real as the hot steel of the train car in which they were imprisoned. They were cold and uncaring, or rather, caring only when it came to measuring the mountains of gold they were hoarding in their cavernous vaults.
A dull fuzzing sound protruded from the train’s intercom. The squawker was back. The train was slowly approaching the next stop. Those wishing to exit had to now extract themselves from their seats and proceed towards the doors. The squawker proceeded to regurgitate disappointing facts, such as that many connections couldn’t be guaranteed, many would be missed, and those that were feasible to make would be difficult.
Slowly heads started popping up above the seats as the attached bodies began to reluctantly follow the instructions of the squawker. Where they went after they got off is unclear and is frankly not relevant. Our world ends at the precipices of the beeping door of the train. There they went, into nothing.