A train whistle woke Kenia. A pain behind her neck told her that she was no longer reclined on a pillow. She rocked her head and opened her eyes. I-beams had replaced the slats of her dorm room’s bunk bed. The texture and scent of the air was unexpected. Gone was the stale industrial cold of the dorm’s AC, along with the manufactured scents of what the detergent company considered “sun-dried linen” that usually clung to her sheets. Also absent were the hints of shea butter, hair conditioner, and scented candles that tended to linger in the room she shared with Audre. Instead the air was warm and dense with humidity, laden with the odors of wood, petroleum preservative, and rusting metal. It immediately brought to mind a rail yard.
The I-beams overhead created tessellations of the night sky beyond them: trapezoids, triangles, and rectangles filled in with satin blackness dusted with stars. The brightest stars she had seen since Nigeria. Her blankets were gone, as was her mattress. She looked left, to where her phone should have been to check the time, and started to fall.
The edge of her bed was not where it was supposed to be. There was nothing beside her but a breeze and a drop. She would have screamed if her balance had not been so precarious and a gasp had not choked her voice. Her hand seized something smooth and metal, like a rail but definitely not her bed. A picture of a train trellis was coming together in her head, but how she had arrived there was a complete mystery. Yet in the disconnected logic of sleepwalking or dreaming, perhaps it was not so strange.
She pressed her leg against one of the ties and pushed herself up, brushing aside debris that had the texture of crumbled charcoal. After a long series of seconds, the rocks made a sound of striking water, like a scattering of raindrops. She settled herself, balanced on the tie. What did they sometimes call these things . . . sleepers? Nothing sleep-inducing about balancing on one over a river gorge. Kenia felt like a cat stranded in a tree, or an unlucky lumberjack holding on to a floating log.
The train whistle that had awoken her sounded again. The bridge started to throb.
So this is one of those dreams.
She got to her hands and knees, words like “lucid” and “anxiety dreams” floating through her mind, for this all felt so real. Looking down, the irregular shapes of the night sky between the I-beams were replaced by uniform squares of space between the sleepers, framing the river below, a glistening black answer to the stretch of galaxies above.
Could she will herself awake? What horror would it take to do so?
The train whistle blew again, closer this time, the vibrations reverberating through her bare feet as she determined the direction of the sound. It was difficult, as the wail echoed from all around, bouncing from one side of the gorge to the other. A dusting of rust began to rain on her, a tremor passing through the beams above. The train whistle pierced the air again, this time accompanied by the flash of the locomotive’s headlamp blinking between the silhouette of trees. It was not long before the engine itself rounded the bend, a floating cone of light at its nose, the flare hiding the thundering beast of cranking, hammering metal that nonetheless announced itself with a loud hiss of steam.
Kenia considered her surroundings. A traffic and pedestrian bridge ran parallel to the trellis, lit by antique streetlamps. It was much too far away to offer any hope of escape in the form of jumping—unless this was a dream wherein she had superpowers, of course. But since none had manifested yet she refrained, her mind registering the mid-century cars passing by with wide grills, starched roofs, vintage decals, and whitewall tires. She even noted a tailfin lined with glowing brake lights before she turned to flee, the tremors of the beams impossible to ignore.
She stepped from one sleeper-tie to the next, placing each step carefully since failure to land her foot properly would send her plunging into the darkness below. Her progress was inadequate, the locomotive lumbering and closing with mechanized, implacable, efficiency. The end of the bridge, where she could see the floodlights of an industrial space with steel towers and glistening slopes of coal, might as well have been miles away. The sides of the bridge would offer too little room for her to stand while the train passed. The locomotive neared, the heat pumping out of its venting made the girders and stars beyond shimmer. The kachunck-kachunk kachunk-kachunk of wheelsets rolling from rail to rail drowned out all other sound but the whistle. All was noise. All was vibration. Rust was tumbling down in a blizzard now, falling in her hair, in her mouth, in her eyes. She could not see the ties now, her eyes watering too much. It was too far to the end of the bridge. The train was closing, the light upon her, illuminating the wood grain of the ties and her own stumbling shadow across them. It wasn’t a choice any longer. She pressed her arms against her side and dropped between the rails.
Steel thunder rumbled overhead, the sound diminishing as she fell. The whistle cut the air again, this time its frequency warbling as her body accelerated in its fall. The rush of air lifted her shirt up to her bra, cold passing around her torso. She tried to hold her feet together, to brace herself for the shock of the cold water below.