Too Many Trains

          The train thundered overhead; this was the safest overpass in the city. The dulled, repetitive clunk-clank of the steel wheels vibrated the concrete above their heads, sending sandy fragments into their hair. J.J.’s bleach-blond spikes didn’t suit his six-foot-six frame, which looked as if he had been put together with wires and worked by a puppeteer. He sat, legs crossed, on the black asphalt with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. His face looked like something out of a Salvador Dali painting.
           “Hey J.J., when we make it to the top, you’re going to have to put on some weight and lay off the ice.”
          “You’re always going to be a damn dreamer aren’t you? Never going to realize that this is all we have, the two of us and the trains.” His heart raced faster than it was meant to go. He’d already done enough.
          Eve’s smile faded slightly. She wrapped her ankle with a rag someone used to wipe oil off their dipstick. She had fractured her ankle making the last jump, and the pain was starting to come back as the high wore off. J.J. played with the foil they had taken from the dumpster, cleaning and drying it with the patience of a new mother.
          She crawled over and nudged his elbow with her nose. He reached into his pocket, pulling out the cellophane saved from the last pack of cigarettes they had stolen. Reused and sealed with melted brown edges, inside was the drug.
          Her mind wandered as pain and memory overtook her. Eve was outside the high school, a freshman waiting for her friends to finish their nightly round of detention, when this amazing looking guy came over and asked her if she knew the way to the nearest train station. He must have been seventeen.
          “Yeah,” she muttered under her breath, nervously wishing she could turn herself inside out. At least then she wouldn’t have to see him as he could see her. She reached within and gathered courage she didn’t know she had and asked where he was from.
          “Everywhere,” he responded, his eyes the same dusty blond as her hair. His half-sideways crooked smile drew her in. The words of her alcoholic mother pounded behind her eardrums like the rumbling of tribal drums in the wild: “Don’t come home, never come home. I dare you.” Eve thought for a moment, then without fear or reluctance she said, “I can’t tell you how to get there, but I could show you.” Detention friends forgotten, Eve never made it home.
         By the time reality returned, J.J. had poured the contents of the cellophane onto the carefully folded foil.
         “Hey J.J., what are you doing, man? You’ve already done too much; you can’t afford another hospital stay. I can’t outrun the cops this time.”
         The suffering was becoming too much for her sixteen-year-old body. She was crashing hard.
         Three months after they had left, she’d walked into a Wal-mart. Hanging in the entry, as always, was the wall of missing children, except this time she saw the face of the old her. No one would have recognized her now; her once dishwater hair was black with lavender roots, and her slightly overweight body, now frail, looked lifeless in the public bathroom mirrors.
         She was thinking of her mom as she faded in and out. In two years, she only remembered one other time she’d missed her mother, who never really wanted her.
         “We’re losing him,” the EMT’s voice sounded so real. She sat, paralyzed, in the ambulance watching him slip away. She was too high, too out of touch to realize what was going on. He had overdosed, he was dying, and it was taking all the modern technology available to bring him back. His heart was killing him, beating faster and faster until it finally stopped. They brought him back, he ripped the IV’s out of his arm, and they ran from the hospital, passing the cops as they crashed through the emergency room doors.
         When she woke up from her pain-inflicted daze, he was sitting on the asphalt slamming his back against the cinderblocks; his eyes were fluttering back and forth like a madman watching a car race in fast forward. The foil had fallen from his hands, a very small amount of the translucent substance left. She crawled over and grabbed it. Eve knew there was nothing left to do for him right now; he wouldn’t even hear her if she tried to speak. She placed the pen between her trembling lips and smoked what was left. It wasn’t enough to make her feel better; it wasn’t even enough to keep her awake. She crawled to his side and drifted off to sleep as he tweaked harder than she had ever seen.
The sun rose and shone on their cold bodies. His skin was colder than she expected. She rubbed her eyes, trying hard to shake off the pain and feening. The blurred sleep started to fade.
         “J.J.”
         She looked over, his eyes were wide, empty. He was colder than the chill that had taken her, and no white breath escaped him. The puppeteer had cut the strings.
Something inside of her wouldn’t allow her to cry. With a blur of fury, she pounded his chest with her fists. His eyes were vacant; his rigid body refused to give in to the pummeling. Her hands unclenched, finding his face. Then she crawled along the concrete and collapsed, far away from the contaminated vision.
         “Too many trains,” she whispered her goodbye to him.
         Eve rose to her feet. When she finally reached the tracks, she found a girl she knew would have at least a rail for her. After snorting the bluish powder, she found a secure hiding place on the next train.
         “Yeah,” she whispered to herself, lolling back and forth with the clunk-clank of the wheels, “too many trains.”

Amy Crittenden is a full-time student at WVC with plans to transfer and major in creative writing. She is a practicing Pagan and lives in Cashmere with her elf-eared son, Tristen. She writes a lot about death and morbid stuff, but we like her anyway.