Do you risk your life, your safety, and the women you love for a dream?

Sometimes just a single step from a moving train can provide the answer.

A heart-warming contemporary fantasy story.

 

 

 

THE CALL OF THE TRACK AHEAD

 

 

ONE

 

 

Today he would jump.

The thought echoed around inside Mason Green’s head and he sat upright in the coach seat, his two small blankets bunching across his lap and over his legs. Finally, after all the days, months, years of trying to decide, today he would jump.

He had decided.

The train rocked in its familiar motion of smooth track, a faint, consistent click-click as the wheels of the car ticked away the time. It was still pitch-black outside the cold, slightly fogged windows. The only light came from above the doors leading into the car forward and the car behind. The air held a chill, and around him everyone slept, the sounds of snoring mixed with deep breathing and the rhythmic clicking of the wheels on the tracks.

He knew those sounds well.

For as long as he could remember, he had called the front aisle seat of the fifth car back from the dining car his home. As of last evening, there were sixteen cars behind his. Sometimes there were more, sometimes less. Since the train never stopped, he had no idea how those cars were added or how the constant stream of new people came on board.

They just did.

He couldn’t remember coming on board either. But he liked being here at first. He had always loved trains as a kid. Since his parents had both worked long hours at thankless jobs, and his room was in the basement of his house, they hadn’t cared what he did down there as long as he didn’t get in the way of the laundry room. So, in the unfinished large room next to his half-finished bedroom, he had built a very intricate model train layout, focusing at times on it instead of his studies or even girls. He built mountains, tunnels, rivers and lakes with train bridges over them. It became so real, that at times it helped him escape from the arguments going on upstairs between his parents.

As he had gotten older, he had dreamed of riding trains and seeing the country. He had a shelf full of books about trains in his room. He even thought of maybe going off and working for the railroad, but with all the pressures of college and starting his new corporate job, he had just never gotten around to it.

But more than anything, from his earliest memories, he had wanted to start and run his own toy store. He hadn’t gotten around to that yet, either. In fact, he hadn’t done anything at all with his life except school and work, right up to the point he found himself on the train.

He had been in his parents’ old house, after his father’s funeral, down in the basement, staring at the remains of his old train layout. His mother had just left it there for the decade since he had moved out. At times over the years, he had packed up parts of it, hoping to rebuild it someday when he had his own house. He hadn’t done that, so most of it still remained in his parents’ basement, covered in dust just like his dreams.

He had been sitting there in the basement, staring at the old track and the mountains and lakes he had built when the next thing he realized, he was on the train.

No memory of how, no memory of what had happened between that moment in the basement and his first waking moment on the train.

For some reason, he sort of knew that no time had passed. And that no time was passing outside the train, either. But it felt like it passed in a normal manner on the train. He just didn’t age.

Now he had been on the train for a very long time. Years and years. Over those long years, he had lived in every car, seen every type of human come through. Some people had become friends. Others enemies. He could barely remember most of their names. But almost without exception, they had all jumped. Taking the leap from a moving train car was the only way off, since the train never stopped, and everyone seemed to take it at one point or another.

Today he would, too.

Today he would jump.

Paula Simpson, his seatmate for the past four months, snored softly, her head on a pillow against the window. Even in sleep, she smelled of fresh peaches and the great outdoors.

That was one of the many things that had drawn him to her when they met over lunch one afternoon in the dining car. She had blue eyes, just like his, and she liked that. They both had blonde hair, and she liked that, too, even though his was thinning. Her nose was short and, as she called it, “perky.” He had more of a Roman nose, which she said fit great with hers when they kissed.

Two days after they met, she moved her stuff up to the window seat beside him. She was special, the most special person he could remember meeting on the train.

Over the months, they talked a lot about their lives, about how they grew up, about their parents, about their dreams, and about jumping. Everyone on the train talked a lot about jumping.

Since she was new on the train, and he had been on board for so long, he had shown her all the normal places to jump. Passengers jumped at all places along the train’s circular route through the mountains. Some jumped into the lakes or rivers as the train passed over the bridges. Mason was sure that none of them survived, but Paula wasn’t. She said that if they hit the water just right it would be fine. It depended on how well they planned it and how much control they had.

Some passengers went crazy and didn’t pay any attention at all to where they jumped. They would step boldly into the night and let fate do with them as it would.

Mason doubted any of them made it and Paula agreed. She said planning was the important part of success, not jumping blindly.

Mason had always wondered why, when the train came around again in eighteen days, there was never a sign of any of the jumpers, and why no one ever came back on board. He took that to mean that he would only have one chance – and that thought had scared him even more, causing him to stay seated month after month, year after year, just thinking about what he should do with his only real chance.

Paula said the reason that there were no sign of the jumpers, or anyone else along the tracks, was obvious. The world took care of the failures and the ones who made it moved on, away from the train, into their lives.

Actually it didn’t matter to Mason. He firmly believed that most of the jumpers failed, and for some reason he couldn’t shake that fear.

It was that belief that had kept him on the train for so long.

But he did have a plan in which he thought he could survive a jump. Carefully worked out and thought through, he had talked the plan over with Paula on the third afternoon after she moved to the seat beside him.

“There,” he had said, pointing ahead into the wind as they stood arm in arm on the open deck at the back of the last car. The day had been crisp and cold and the wind cut at them. Mason had never had a coat, so he had a blanket draped over his shoulders. Paula had on the ski parka and gloves she had arrived with.

The train had slowed for slightly rough track right before the lake bridge. There was a steep slope of grass and dirt that fell away from the tracks and ended in brush at the bottom near the lake’s edge.

“See,” he had said, pointing down the slope as they went by. “If we timed it just right we would hit the slope and roll. We might get hurt a little, but at least we would be off the train.”

Paula had nodded and watched the slope recede into the distance behind them, studying it the way he had hundreds of times. The train would be back at this exact point in eighteen days. They had time to think and talk about it.

On that first day, Mason had turned her out of the wind and looked her right in the eye to drive his point home. “We would be alive again. Back in the real world. And we would be together.”

Under his hands he had felt Paula shudder, either from the fear or the cold.

That had been four months ago. Every eighteen days they talked about jumping and decided against it. Paula just didn’t feel ready yet. She needed more time to think about it, to plan. She just hadn’t spent enough time on the train.

Every time around, Mason had decided to wait for her.

Mason glanced around the dark car, at all the sleeping people, and then at Paula, the faint light making her skin appear even more beautiful and soft than it really was. He stared at her for the longest time, just thinking.

He had to face facts. He was stuck on the train, just like so many others around him. He wasn’t sure, but he would bet there were many who simply died of old age on the train, never finding the courage to jump, to get on with their lives. He didn’t want to be one of those, but he was quickly headed that way.

His dad had been that way. He had never, ever, followed his dreams with anything. His fear and his wife, Mason’s mother, had made sure that he stayed in a dead-end job, working in a miserable place he hated right up to the moment of his early death.

What a waste of a life.

Before the train, before his father’s death, Mason had been doing the same thing. Getting by, existing, staying away from anything that might be risky, both in work and with women. True, he had been dreaming of bigger and better things, of his toy store, but it was the same dream he had had when he was a child.

When his father had died, Mason was thirty-two and had done nothing.

Where had all the years gone?

That day, before he had ended up on the train, he had sat in his old basement, staring at the remains of his train layout, feeling sorry for himself. He had nothing to show for the years, just as he had nothing to show now for the years on this train. Every eighteen days, he would start his path over again, following the same tracks, knowing every turn, every bump.

Around and around, waiting to gain a little courage and take some action.

Thousands and thousands of people had come on board since he had and then jumped off. He had had a number of lovers, some of whom jumped without him in the middle of the night, somehow knowing he wouldn’t jump with them.

Through college and beyond, he had had the same experience with the women he met. They wanted more from him in the way of commitment than he was willing to give them. He had been afraid of that as well. They had eventually left him, too, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Sherry, his last seatmate before Paula, had jumped on his slope. He was supposed to have jumped with her.

He had been too afraid, and instead just stood on the train and watched as she tumbled and rolled down the slope and vanished into the bushes at the bottom.

There was no sign of her eighteen days later.

The slope was coming by again today. With or without Paula, he would jump.

It was time.

Actually, it was long past time. He might fail in the jump, but he couldn’t die in this seat, without moving, without doing anything with his life.

He couldn’t die the way his father had died.

He had to at least try.