Featured flash fiction

by Kelsey Ford '11

Tuesday January 22, 2008

The chug-chug of the train – a chug-chug we’re taught at the age when bananas are still bright-yellow – is not true. What is true is that when the train pulls into the station, it comes almost slowly, the grimy silver formerly a smooth, elegant line through the countryside. The doors open and bodies walk in my direction. They don’t look around for orientation.

There are so many but still I can see his head above the rest and as he moves closer I can tell it’s him, too, because of the shirt he’s wearing and the book he’s clutching tightly in his left hand. It’s November, so the book is probably a Hemingway.

We hug, quickly, as if we are afraid. As if? We are afraid.

How was the trip? I ask.

He nods and says something about sleeping through most of it. I know he didn’t sleep at all, but I don’t say anything. I note the receipt wedged near the back of the book (it’s The Sun Also Rises).

We had begun walking with the direction-driven people. It took a lot for me to keep walking and not look in his direction – if I had I probably would have seen his heavy eyes looking almost straight-ahead but not quite, more upward, as if searching for something in the air that wasn’t there or wasn’t there yet or wasn’t there still.

I asked what he thought about one of his author’s new books.

I’d picked the book up last week at a Barnes and Noble. It was on the New In Paperbacks table. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the bookshop’s literary magazine section, flipping through all the pages where I wasn’t.

No good, he responded.

I hadn’t expected that.

Not for the first time, I have nothing to say. So I don’t and we keep walking, slowing as we reach Vanderbilt Hall and its vaulted teal ceiling with golden constellations.

I turn towards him when we’re almost at the center of the hall. His gaze is at the level of the departures table, but that’s not what he is looking at.

Or maybe it is. But he won’t have to know the track for that train for another few days. I don’t like to think that he’s already thinking about that track.

And then he turns towards me and looks down and sees me. I can tell when he really sees me because of that certain look. The only thing I can think about when I see that look is how creamy and warm tomato soup can be when it’s done just right. And as he looks at me, I can feel my tomato-soup smile building itself around an invisible spoon.

So that book wasn’t good. I think I already knew that and that’s hardly the point anyways. There’s always Hemingway to talk about, again. Or Kerouac. Or my books – McEwan, Murakami, Gaarder.

And perhaps, it being the middle of November, we’ll discuss their words over a fake-mahogany table, each with a bowl of tomato soup in front of us and a steaming grilled-cheese to the side. He’ll have a cup of black coffee and I’ll have an orange juice – no pulp.