Rail Tracks Quotes

Every year, at 8:00 PM on the second Saturday of July, hundreds of people gather along a section of Los Angeles rail track to drop their pants and moon passing passenger trains.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails.

He gathers me up and I'm weightless before he sets me on the railing. He's the only thing keeping me from falling back, out of the reach of daylight. I'm not afraid of falling. I don't fear the sky beyond the train tracks like I did before. I can go anywhere just so long as it's with him.

Life is like a train ride. The passengers on the train are seemingly going to the same destination as you, but based on their belief in you or their belief that the train will get them to their desired destination they will stay on the ride or they will get off somewhere during the trip. People can and will get off at any stop. Just know that where people get off is more of an reflection on them, than it is on you. There will be a few people in your life that will make the whole trip with you, who believe in you, accept that you are human and that mistakes will be made along the way, and that you will get to your desired destination - together, no matter what. Be very grateful of these people. They are rare and when you find one, don't let go of them - ever. Be blessed for the ones who get on at the worst stops when no one is there. Remember those people, they are special. Always hold them dear to your heart. Be very wary of people sneaking on at certain stops when things are going good and acting like they have been there for the whole ride. For they will be the first to depart. There will be ones who secretly try to get off the ride and there will be those that very publicly will jump off. Don't pay any heed to the defectors. Pay heed to the passengers that are still on the trip. They are the important ones. If someone tries to get back on the train - don't be angry or hold a grudge, let them. Just see where they are around the next hard turn. If they are buckled in - accept them. If they are pulling the hand rail alarm again - then let them off the train freely and waste no space in your head for them again, ever. There will be times that the train will be moving slow, at almost a crawls pace. Appreciate that you can take in the view. There will be times where the train is going so fast that everything is a blur. Enjoy the sense of speed in your life, as it is exhilarating but unsustainable. There will also be the chance that the train derails. If that does happen, it will hurt, a lot, for a long time. But there will be people who will appear out of no where who will get you back on track. Those will be the people that will matter most in your life. Love them forever. For you can never repay these people. The thing is, that even if you could repay them, they wouldn't accept it anyway. Just pay it forward. Eventually your train will get to its final stop and you will need to deboard. At that time you will realize that life is about the journey AND the destination. Know and have faith that at the end of your ride your train will have the right passengers on board and all the passengers that were on board at one time or another were there for a distinct purpose. Enjoy the ride.

On Earth you have to spend a lot of time traveling in between places, be it on roads or on rail tracks or in careers or relationships.

Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end. The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him--man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to--oh, stop it!

When he heard light, rushing footfalls, he turned his head. Someone was racing along the second-floor balcony. Then laughter drifted down from above. Glorious feminine laughter. He leaned out the archway and glanced at the grand staircase. Bella appeared on the landing above, breathless, smiling, a black satin robe gathered in her hands. As she slowed at the head of the stairs, she looked over her shoulder, her thick dark hair swinging like a mane. The pounding that came next was heavy and distant, growing louder until it was like boulders hitting the ground. Obviously, it was what she was waiting for. She let out a laugh, yanked her robe up even higher, and started down the stairs, bare feet skirting the steps as if she were floating. At the bottom, she hit the mosaic floor of the foyer and wheeled around just as Zsadist appeared in second-story hallway. The Brother spotted her and went straight for the balcony, pegging his hands into the rail, swinging his legs up and pushing himself straight off into thin air. He flew outward, body in a perfect swan dive--except he wasn't over water, he was two floors up over hard stone. John's cry for help came out as a mute, sustained rush of air-- Which was cut off as Zsadist dematerialized at the height of the dive. He took form twenty feet in front of Bella, who watched the show with glowing happiness. Meanwhile, John's heart pounded from shock...then pumped fast for a different reason. Bella smiled up at her mate, her breath still hard, her hands still gripping the robe, her eyes heavy with invitation. And Zsadist came forward to answer her call, seeming to get even bigger as he stalked over to her. The Brother's bonding scent filled the foyer, just as his low, lionlike growl did. The male was all animal at the moment....a very sexual animal. "You like to be chased, nalla, " Z said in a voice so deep it distorted. Bella's smile got even wider as she backed up into a corner. "Maybe." "So run some more, why don't you." The words were dark and even John caught the erotic threat in them. Bella took off, darting around her mate, going for the billiards room. Z tracked her like prey, pivoting around, his eyes leveled on the female's streaming hair and graceful body. As his lips peeled off his fangs, the white canines elongated, protruding from his mouth. And they weren't the only response he had to his shellan. At his hips, pressing into the front of his leathers, was an erection the size of a tree trunk. Z shot John a quick glance and then went back to his hunt, disappearing into the room, the pumping growl getting louder. From out of the open doors, there was a delighted squeal, a scramble, a female's gasp, and then....nothing. He'd caught her. ......When Zsadist came out a moment later, he had Bella in his arms, her dark hair trailing down his shoulder as she lounged in the strength that held her. Her eyes locked on Z's face while he looked where he was going, her hand stroking his chest, her lips curved in a private smile. There was a bite mark on her neck, one that had very definitely not been there before, and Bella's satisfaction as she stared at the hunger in her hellren's face was utterly compelling. John knew instinctively that Zsadist was going to finish two things upstairs: the mating and the feeding. The Brother was going to be at her throat and in between her legs. Probably at the same time. God, John wanted that kind of connection.

Many textbooks point out that no animal has evolved wheels and cite the fact as an example of how evolution is often incapable of finding the optimal solution to an engineering problem. But it is not a good example at all. Even if nature could have evolved a moose on wheels, it surely would have opted not to. Wheels are good only in a world with roads and rails. They bog down in any terrain that is soft, slippery, steep, or uneven. Legs are better. Wheels have to roll along an unbroken supporting ridge, but legs can be placed on a series of separate footholds, an extreme example being a ladder. Legs can also be placed to minimize lurching and to step over obstacles. Even today, when it seems as if the world has become a parking lot, only about half of the earth's land is accessible to vehicles with wheels or tracks, but most of the earth's land is accessible to vehicles with feet: animals, the vehicles designed by natural selection.

From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words. ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning. ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful.

What happens when a leader misses his steps on the ladder is what happens when a train misses the rail. Be on track.

Through the dark night chasing the morning light That headlight streaming white through the night

It seems the only way we can avoid being the victims of change is to reconcile with the inevitable. We must never stand on the rail tracks of positive change.

Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the song tingling from the transistor on the beach blanket. To locate those songs again can become, with age, something like a religious quest, as suggested by the frequent use of the phrase "Holy Grail" to describe hard-to-find tracks. The collector is haunted by the knowledge that somewhere on the planet an intact chunk of his past still exists, uncorrupted by time or circumstance.

I smack into him as if shoved from behind. He doesn't budge, not an inch. Just holds my shoulders and waits. Maybe he's waiting for me to find my balance. Maybe he's waiting for me to gather my pride. I hope he's got all day. I hear people passing on the boardwalk and imagine them staring. Best-case scenario, they think I know this guy, that we're hugging. Worst-case scenario, they saw me totter like an intoxicated walrus into this complete stranger because I was looking down for a place to park our beach stuff. Either way, he knows what happened. He knows why my cheek is plastered to his bare chest. And there is definite humiliation waiting when I get around to looking up at him. Options skim through my head like a flip book. Option One: Run away as fast as my dollar-store flip flops can take me. Thing is, tripping over them is partly responsible for my current dilemma. In fact, one of them is missing, probably caught in a crack of the boardwalk. I'm getting Cinderella didn't feel this foolish, but then again, Cinderella wasn't as clumsy as an intoxicated walrus. Option two: Pretend I've fainted. Go limp and everything. Drool, even. But I know this won't work because my eyes flutter too much to fake it, and besides, people don't blush while unconscious. Option Three: Pray for a lightning bolt. A deadly one that you feel in advance because the air gets all atingle and your skin crawls-or so the science books say. It might kill us both, but really, he should have been paying more attention to me when he saw that I wasn't paying attention at all. For a shaved second, I think my prayers are answered because I go get tingly all over; goose bumps sprout everywhere, and my pulse feels like electricity. Then I realize, it's coming from my shoulders. From his hands. Option Last: For the love of God, peel my cheek off his chest and apologize for the casual assault. Then hobble away on my one flip-flop before I faint. With my luck, the lightning would only maim me, and he would feel obligated to carry me somewhere anyway. Also, do it now. I ease away from him and peer up. The fire on my cheeks has nothing to do with the fact that it's sweaty-eight degrees in the Florida sun and everything to do with the fact that I just tripped into the most attractive guy on the planet. Fan-flipping-tastic. "Are-are you all right?" he says, incredulous. I think I can see the shape of my cheek indented on his chest. I nod. "I'm fine. I'm used to it. Sorry." I shrug off his hands when he doesn't let go. The tingling stays behind, as if he left some of himself on me. "Jeez, Emma, are you okay?" Chloe calls from behind. The calm fwopping of my best friend's sandals suggests she's not as concerned as she sounds. Track star that she is, she would already be at my side if she thought I was hurt. I groan and face her, not surprised that she's grinning wide as the equator. She holds out my flip-flop, which I try not to snatch from her hand. "I'm fine. Everybody's fine," I say. I turn back to the guy, who seems to get more gorgeous by the second. "You're fine, right? No broken bones or anything?" He blinks, gives a slight nod. Chloe setts her surfboard against the rail of the boardwalk and extends her hand to him. He accepts it without taking his eyes off me. "I'm Chloe and this is Emma," she says. "We usually bring her helmet with us, but we left it back in the hotel room this time.

While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave. Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet—from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair—t,a,c,l—she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note. Got it. The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head,and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude. She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an un-analyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vairfurred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath. A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters.

The siren soared again, closer at hand, and then, with no anticipatory roar and clamour, a dark and sinuous body curved into view against the shadows far down the high-banked track, and with no sound but the rush of the cleft wind and the clock like tick of the rails, moved towards the bridge - it was an electric train. Above the engine two vivid blurs of blue light formed incessantly a radiant crackling bar between them, which, like a spluttering flame in a lamp beside a corpse, lit for an instant the successive rows of trees and caused Gloria to draw back instinctively to the far side of the road. The light was tepid - the temperature of warm blood... The clicking blended suddenly with itself in a rush of even sound, and then, elongating in sombre elasticity, the thing roared blindly by her and thundered onto the bridge, racing the lurid shaft of fire it cast into the solemn river alongside. Then it contracted swiftly, sucking in its sound until it left only a reverberant echo, which died upon the farther bank.

. . . in the distance I hear a train rushing over the rails, but we are moving away from this place and all that is has meant to us, and that is all right.

I’ve gone off the rails. Hell, I’d gone off the entire fucking track.

You must learn not to look upon the world as a lost and decaying thing but as a something perfect and glorious which is going on to a most beautiful completeness; and you must learn to see men and women not as lost and accursed things, but as perfect beings advancing to become complete. There are no “bad” or “evil” people. An engine which is on the rails pulling a heavy train is perfect after its kind, and it is good. The power of steam which drives it is good. Let a broken rail throw the engine into the ditch, and it does not become bad or evil by being so displaced; it is a perfectly good engine, but off the track. The power of steam which drives it into the ditch and wrecks it is not evil, but a perfectly good power. So that which is misplaced or applied in an incomplete or partial way is not evil. There are no evil people; there are perfectly good people who are off the track, but they do not need condemnation or punishment; they only need to get upon the rails again. That which is undeveloped

I believe that time is like a train, with men hanging out in front of the engine and off the back of the caboose; the man in front is laying down new tracks the moment before the train touches them and the man in the caboose is tearing up the rails the moment they are passed. There is no linear continuation: The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. It cannot be traversed.

To live at all is to share a world with cagey magic, skeptical magic, asshole magic. But, honestly, the trees must belong to something; the blossoms that tongue each groove between buildings, the water and the stone and the serious man-made steel railings all must belong. This major artery where blood and starlight pump along the tracks, where banks and malls and office towers shudder and gestate in the concrete like baobab trees.

In truth, there were no tracks of destiny through the chaos of life, only paths forged by decisions. She had dreamed of riding a fast train to stardom, but the rails and ties of those tracks had never been carefully laid.

The cast was off, wasn’t it? The doctor said walk, gentle exercise. Rehab said ditto. Ten days ago she’d graduated from the track thing with the rails, walked all the way to the cake Reenie and Carol got for her to celebrate. Started to cry when they hugged her.

Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him proper. But he don’t know your wants. He don’t know your needs or feelings or what’s inside you, for you ain’t equal to him in no measure. You just a nigger to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse. Your needs and wants got no track, whether you is a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, or shy, or fat, or don’t eat biscuits, or can’t suffer the change of weather easily. What difference do it make? None to him, for you is living on the bottom rail.

Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him prosper. But he don't know your wants. He don't know your needs or feelings or what's inside you, for you ain't equal to him in no measure. You just a n****r to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse. Your needs and wants got no track, whether you is a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, or shy, or fat, or don't eat biscuits, or can't suffer the change of weather easily. What difference do it make? None to him, for you is living on the bottom rail.

But these things now belonged to the past, and he was flying toward the future. As they banked, Dr. Floyd could see below him a maze of buildings, then a great airstrip, then a broad, dead-straight scar across the flat Florida landscape—the multiple rails of a giant launching track. At its end, surrounded by vehicles and gantries, a spaceplane lay gleaming in a pool of light, being prepared for its leap to the stars. In a sudden failure of perspective, brought on by his swift changes of speed and height, it seemed to Floyd that he was looking down on a small silver moth, caught in the beam of a flashlight.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry—determined to make a day of it.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, -- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

What of the part where memory and loss and yearning are stored? Surely, they were still out there somewhere - gone to wherever the forsaken are banished. Wandering the burnt-out Alabama plantations, the fields rancid with enslaved sorrow. Across tracks built by Chinese rail workers, shot en masse come payday to save a dime. Into full-plotted cemeteries behind Indian boarding schools and beneath the shadows of burning crosses, white hoods peaked like snowcapped mountains. Over the grounds of Manzanar and potter's fields glutted with migrant peach pickers. Who gets remembered in the great American experiment? Who is forgotten? What becomes of those whose names are dust? Tell me this country ain't haunted.

I used to think that life was hills and valleys-you go through a dark time, then to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore. Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe it is it's kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times in your life, there is something bad that needs to be worked on. And no matter how bad things are in our lives, there is always something good to thank God for.

Your dad told me what happened today . . . out in the woods. He told me that you tracked down the guy who’s been killing all the girls around here . . . that you put yourself in danger.” Violet couldn’t tell if he was angry or annoyed . . . or both. He ran his hand through his messy hair in an agitated gesture that indicated he was getting all worked up. “And it’s not like it was the first time you’ve done that. Trouble seems to follow you wherever you go, and you’re the only person I know who doesn’t seem to care. I don’t even want to think about what could have happened to you if I hadn’t shown up last night while Grady was . . . assaulting you.” He paused as if it really was too much to think about, and then he continued to rail at her. “You can’t even go to the mall safely. I made a promise to your parents, and you just wandered off without even telling me where you were going.” His voice was suddenly too abrasive, and it felt to Violet like he was scratching his nails across a chalkboard. She bristled against the accusation in his tone, and suddenly he wasn’t the only one who was upset. “And you didn’t speak to me for a week!” she lashed back at him. “What was that all about? I spent the entire week waiting for you to stop ignoring me. And all because I didn’t bother to check in with you? You don’t get to tell me what to do! You’re not my father, you know.” “Thanks for clarifying that, Violet,” he said sardonically. “It would be creepy if you got your boyfriend and your father confused.” Violet practically jumped when he said the word boyfriend. Obviously she’d noticed that they’d gone beyond just friendship, but she hadn’t been entirely sure what that meant for them. Apparently Jay had it all figured out.

Like here it was that I entered that stage when a child overcomes naivite enough to realize an adult's emotional reaction as somethimes freakish for its inconsistencies, so can, on his own reasoning canvas, paint those early pale colors of judgement, resulting from initial moments of ability to critically examine life's perplexities, in tentative little brain-engine stirrings, before they faded to quickly join that train of remembered experience carrying signals indicating existence which itself far outweighs traction effort by thinking's soon slipping drivers to effectively resist any slack-action advantage, for starting so necessitates continual cuts on the hauler - performed as if governed lifelong by the tagwork of a student-green foreman who, crushed under on rushing time always building against his excessive load of emotional contents, is forever a lost ball in the high weeds of personal developments - until, with ever changing emphasis through a whole series of grades of consciousness (leading up from root-beginnings of obscure childish inconscious soul within a world), early lack - for what child sustains logic? - reaches a point of late fossilization, resultant of repeated wrong moves in endless switching of dark significances crammed inside the cranium, where, through such hindering habits, there no longer is the flexibility for thought transfer and unloading of dead freight that a standard gauge would afford and thus, as Faustian Destiny dictates, is an inept mink, limited, being in existence firmly tracked just above the constant "T" biased ballast supporting wherever space yearnings lead the worn rails of civilized comprehension, so henceforth is restricted to mere pickups and setouts of drab distortion, while traveling wearily along its familiar Western Thinking right-of-way. But choo-choo nonsense aside, ...

But if you’re two guys like us, riding the Bronx tracks, you better make sure you hide any sign of affection if you want to fly under the radar. I’ve known this for the longest—I just hoped it wouldn’t matter. Someone whistles at us and I instantly knew I was wrong. These two guys who were competing in a pull-up contest a few minutes ago walk up to us. The taller one with his jeans leg rolled up asks, “Yo. You two homos faggots?” We both tell him no. His friend, who smells like straight-up armpits, presses his middle finger between Collin’s eyes. He sucks his teeth. “They lying. I bet their little dicks are getting hard right now.” Collin smacks the dude’s hand, which is just as big a mistake as my mom trying to save me from being thrown out the house last night. “Fuck you.” Nightmare after nightmare. One slams my head into the railing, and the other hammers Collin with punches. I try punching the first guy in his nose, but I’m too dizzy and miss. I have no idea how many times he punches me or at what point I end up on the sticky floor with Collin trying to shield me before he’s kicked to the side. Collin turns to me, crying these involuntary tears from shock and pain. His kind brown eyes roll back when he’s kicked in the head. I cry out for help but no one fucking breaks up the fight. No one fucking does the right thing. The train stops and the doors open but there’s no chance for escape. For us, at least.

Whatever the final cost of HS2, all those tens of billions could clearly buy lots of things more generally useful to society than a quicker ride to Birmingham. Then there is all the destruction of the countryside. A high-speed rail line offers nothing in the way of charm. It is a motorway for trains. It would create a permanent very noisy, hyper-visible scar across a great deal of classic British countryside, and disrupt and make miserable the lives of hundreds of thousands of people throughout its years of construction. If the outcome were something truly marvellous, then perhaps that would be a justifiable price to pay, but a fast train to Birmingham is never going to be marvellous. The best it can ever be is a fast train to Birmingham. Remarkably, the new line doesn’t hook up to most of the places people might reasonably want to go to. Passengers from the north who need to get to Heathrow will have to change trains at Old Oak Common, with all their luggage, and travel the last twelve miles on another service. Getting to Gatwick will be even harder. If they want to catch a train to Europe, they will have to get off at Euston station and make their way half a mile along the Euston Road to St Pancras. It has actually been suggested that travelators could be installed for that journey. Can you imagine travelling half a mile on travelators? Somebody find me the person who came up with that notion. I’ll get the horsewhip. Now here’s my idea. Why not keep the journey times the same but make the trains so comfortable and relaxing that people won’t want the trip to end? Instead, they could pass the time staring out the window at all the gleaming hospitals, schools, playing fields and gorgeously maintained countryside that the billions of saved pounds had paid for. Alternatively, you could just put a steam locomotive in front of the train, make all the seats inside wooden and have it run entirely by volunteers. People would come from all over the country to ride on it. In either case, if any money was left over, perhaps a little of it could be used to fit trains with toilets that don’t flush directly on to the tracks, so that when I sit on a platform at a place like Cambridge or Oxford glumly eating a WH Smith sandwich I don’t have to watch blackbirds fighting over tattered fragments of human waste and toilet paper. It is, let’s face it, hard enough to eat a WH Smith sandwich as it is.

all this important stuff has *no one in charge of it.* Some people claim to be, but they're in charge of one tiny piece of it, and maybe they think *their* piece is a brake or a steering wheel, but they're wrong. The world's economy is a runaway train, the driver dead at the switch, the passengers clinging on for dear life as their possessions go flying off the freight-cars and out the windows, and each curve in the tracks threatens to take it off the rails altogether. There's a small number of people in the back of the train who fiercely argue about when it will go off the rails, and whether the train can be slowed down by everyone just calming down and acting as though everything was all right. These people are the economists, and some of the first-class passengers pay them very well for their predictions about whether the train is doing all right and which side of the car they should lean into to prevent their hats from falling off on the next corner. Everyone else ignores them.

Do you want to know my favorite?” My grip tightened on the railing. In. Out. “Andromeda.” Allister moved closer. “An autumn constellation, forty-four light-years away.” His steps were smooth and indifferent, but his voice was dry, as though he found my panic attack positively boring. His attitude brought a small rush of annoyance in, but it was suddenly swayed as my lungs contracted and wouldn’t release. I couldn’t keep a strangled gasp from escaping. “Look up.” It was an order, carrying a harsh edge. With no fight in me, I complied and tilted my head. Tears blurred my vision. Stars swam together and sparkled like diamonds. I was glad they weren’t. Humans would find a way to pluck them from the sky. “Andromeda is the dim, fuzzy star to the right. Find it.” My eyes searched it out. The stars weren’t often easy to see, hidden behind smog and the glow of city lights, but sometimes, on a lucky night like tonight, pollution cleared and they became visible. I found the star and focused on it. “Do you know her story?” he asked, his voice close behind me. A cold wind touched my cheeks, and I inhaled slowly. “Answer me.” “No,” I gritted. “Andromeda was boasted to be one of the most beautiful goddesses.” He moved closer, so close his jacket brushed my bare arm. His hands were in his pockets and his gaze was on the sky. “She was sacrificed for her beauty, tied to a rock by the sea.” I imagined her, a red-haired goddess with a heart of steel chained to a rock. The question bubbled up from the depths of me. “Did she survive?” His gaze fell to me. Down the tear tracks to the blood on my bottom lip. His eyes darkened, his jaw tightened, and he looked away. “She did.” I found the star again. Andromeda. “Ask me what her name means.” It was another rough demand, and I had the urge to refuse. To tell him to stop bossing me around. However, I wanted to know—I suddenly needed to. But he was already walking away, toward the exit. “Wait,” I breathed, turning to him. “What does her name mean?” He opened the door and a sliver of light poured onto the terrace. Black suit. Broad shoulders. Straight lines. His head turned just enough to meet my gaze. Blue. “It means ruler of men.” An icy breeze almost swallowed his words before they reached me, whipping my hair at my cheeks. And then he was gone.

Lots of nights I would go to bed early, too. Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep. You get so during the day you catch yourself suddenly standing still and waiting and listening. You are like a little boy at the railroad station, ready to go away on the train, which hasn't come yet. You look way up the track, but can't see the little patch of black smoke yet. You fidget around, but all at once you stop in the middle of your fidgeting, and listen. You can't hear it yet. Then you go and kneel down in your Sunday clothes in the cinders, for which your mother is going to snatch you bald-headed, and put your ear to the rail and listen for the first soundless rustle which will come in the rail long before the little black patch begins to grow on the sky. You get so you listen for night, long before it comes over the horizon, and long, long before it comes charging and stewing and thundering to you like a big black locomotive and the black cars grind to a momentary stop and the porter with the black, shining face helps you up the steps, and says, "Yassuh, little boss, yassuh.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was out of my seat and rushing up toward the railing that divided the seats from the field. I had to make sure he was okay. I couldn’t just sit here and watch him lie there in pain. I heard my name called, but I ignored it as I flung my leg over the top railing and prepared to hoist myself over. One of the guys working security happened to see me and he rushed over and ordered me to stop. “I can’t. That’s my…” My voice broke. I couldn’t force the word boyfriend between my lips. It just wasn’t enough. It just didn’t describe how desperate I was to get to him. “He’s my everything,” I finished. The security guard gave me a grim look. “You can’t come on the field.” A lone tear tracked its way down my cheek, and I craned my neck. Frustrated, I glanced up at the big screen to see if it was showing a different angle. But they weren’t playing Romeo. They were focused on me. I blinked at the site of me half straddling the railing and the security guard standing there with a grim look on his face as he stared me down. My cheeks were red, behind my glasses, my eyes wild. I turned away from the screen, irritated that they weren’t focused on Romeo. I glanced at the guard. “I’m coming over.” He crossed his arms over his chest as if to say, I dare you. I flung my other leg over so I was balanced on the bottom rung. “This is your last warning,” the guard shouted. The crowd started to cheer and go wild. Romeo’s number started filling the air. I looked up. He was okay! He was on his feet, helmet in hand, and laughing at something Braeden was saying. Beside him, the coach looked relieved, and all the Wolves were clapping. The guy who’d mowed him down was being escorted off the field. Jackass. Relief made me weak and a sob caught in my throat. I sagged back against the cold metal of the rails. The guard gestured for backup, and a few others that were dressed just like him started my way. I mean, really. He was being a bit dramatic. I was only one girl. And a small one at that.

The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out. I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass. Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun— slow dived from noon—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron—that I know—not gold. 'Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight! Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.) 'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad— Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That's more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—Take some one of your own size; don't pommel me! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way! CHAPTER

A hundred bucks,cuz.And judging by that spectacular toss over the rail, I'd say you earned it." Wyatt tucked the money into his pocket. "It was pretty spectacular, wasn't it? And it worked. It got the attention of our pretty little medic." Jesse,Amy,and Zane stopped dead in their tracks. Amy laughed. "You did all that to get Lee's attention?" "Nothing else I've tried has worked. I was desperate." Jesse shook his head in disbelief. "Did you ever think about just buying her a beer at the Fortune Saloon? I'd think that would be a whole lot simpler than risking broken bones leaping off a bull." "But not nearly as memorable.The next time she sees me at the saloon, she'll know my name." Zane threw back his head and roared. "So will every shrink from here to Helena. You have to be certifiably nuts to do all that just for the sake of a pretty face." "Hey." Wyatt slapped his cousin on the back. "Whatever works.'" Zane pulled out a roll of bills. "Ten says she's already written you off as someone to avoid at all costs." Wyatt's smile brightened. "Chump change. If you want to bet me, make it a hundred." "You got it." Zane pulled a hundred from the roll and handed it to Jesse. "Now match it, cuz. I was going to bet that you can't persuade Marilee Trainor to even speak to you again. But just to make things interesting, I'm betting that you can't get her to have dinner with you tonight." "Dinner? Tonight? Now you're pushing the limits,cuz. She's already refused me." "Put up or shut up." Wyatt arched a brow. "You want me to kiss and tell?" "I don't say anything about kissing. I don't care what you do,after you get her to have dinner with you.That's the bet. So if you're ready to admit defeat, just give me the hundred now." "Uh-oh." Wyatt stopped dead in his tracks. "Is that a dare?" Amy stood between them,shaking her head. "You sound like two little kids." Wyatt shot her a wicked grin. "Didn't you know that all men are just boys at heart?" He reached into his pocket and handed Zane a bill before he strolled away. Over his shoulder he called, "I'll catch you back at the ranch. You can pay me then." He left his cousins laughing and shaking their heads.

Tell me what you and my dad were talking about." Jay jerked away from her as if she'd just slapped him. And Violet realized that she might as well have. He sat up quickly, as if his mind had suddenly cleared from the sensuous haze, and abruptly the teasing grin was wiped clean from his face. "Never mind," she blurted, trying to backpedal. "Forget I said anything." She wanted to go back to where they just were. But it was too late. The determined set of his jaw told her that. "No," he said harshly. "I think we should talk about this, Violet." Even the way he said her name was suddenly hard and angry. "Your dad told me what happened today...out in the woods. He told me that you tracked down the guy who's been killing all the girls around here...that you put yourself in danger." Violet couldn't tell if he was angry or annoyed...or both. He ran his hand through his messy hair in an agitated gesture that indicated he was getting all worked up. "And it's not like it was the first time you've done that. Trouble seems to follow you wherever you go, and you're the only person I know who doesn't seem to care. I don't even want to think about what could have happened to you if I hadn't shown up last night while Grady was...assaulting you." He paused as if it really was too much to think about, and then he continued to rail at her. "You can't even go to the mall safely. I made a promise to your parents, and you just wandered off without even telling me where you were going." His voice was suddenly too abrasive, and it felt to Violet like he was scratching his nails across a chalkboard. She bristled against the accusation in his tone, and suddenly he wasn't the only one who was upset. "And you didn't speak to me for a week!" she lashed back at him. "What was that all about? I spent the entire week waiting for you to stop ignoring me. And all because I didn't bother to check in with you? You don't get to tell me what to do! You're not my father, you know." "Thanks for clarifying that, Violet," he said sardonically. "It would be creepy if you got your boyfriend and your father confused." Violet practically jumped when he said the word boyfriend. Obviously she'd noticed that they'd gone beyond just friendship, but she hadn't been entirely sure what that meant for them. Apparently Jay had it all figured out. But that didn't mean he could push her around.

How would I find someone,” Caleb said, edging the dead man’s legs parallel to one another with his toe, “who would be willing to kill a man?” “Now that, kid, is a man’s chore.” Ethan stretched his back until it cracked mightily. “You mean to kill the one who done that to you?” Ethan hoisted the corpse again and motioned with a nod for Caleb to follow suit. “I suppose I could do it. Depends on the job.” They shuffled across the gaming floor, Ethan kicking chairs and tables out of the way as they went. “Killing’s like anything else—there’s a right man for it.” Caleb couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked Ethan these questions sooner; everyone else took such great pains to protect him that he’d stopped asking lest he hear the same careful, uninformative answers. “What if I needed someone to go kill someone someplace else?” Ethan paused while he fiddled with the latch on the door, holding the man’s entire upper body with one large paw. “Ol’ Jackson Ramus, that’s who you’d call.” Jackson Ramus. The name didn’t seem real to Caleb. He checked it against his images of the men. “Of course Ramus died three, four years ago.” Ethan pitched the door open and the cold wind knocked Caleb backward. Ethan didn’t notice. “He was supposed to be tracking a woman whose husband said she’d been kidnapped. And he found her all right, found her in the lying-down game with another man.” Ethan didn’t slow moving across the icy landing to the railing. “Ramus was a smart man—maybe too smart, maybe not smart enough—and he figured if he came all the way back to ask the husband what to do, he was sure the husband would send him right back the way he came to kill this new man and the cheating wife.” Ethan stopped when they got to the edge of the deck. Caleb spun around, thinking they were going down the stairs when the legs were yanked out of his hands and the body flew through the air. Ethan slapped his palms together. “Of course, Ramus was also what you might call a lazy man. Lazy man with a gun is not the kind of man you want to find yourself next to.” The body landed facedown, the snow leaping into the air with a massive, rushing noise, and settling over the man’s clothes. “So he shot them, both of them. And came back home.” Caleb looked at the body splayed out in the snow, everything at unliving angles. He could barely listen to the words that followed. “But Ol’ Ramus got it wrong. When he came back, the husband was so upset, he shot Ramus between the eyes, stuffed his killing fee inside his mouth, and then shot himself right in his goddamned broken heart.

A folktale in Hokkaido just after the war and passed from conductor to conductor held that the floor of heaven is laced with silver train tracks, and the third rail is solid pearl. The trains that ran along them were fabulous even by the Shinkansen of today: carriages containing whole pine forests hung with gold lanterns, carriages full of rice terraces, carriages lined in red silk where the meal service bought soup, rice-balls, and a neat lump of opium with persimmon tea poured over it in the most delicate of cups. These trains sped past each other, utterly silent, carrying each a complement of ghosts who clutched the branches like leather handholds, and plucked the green rice to eat raw, amd fell back insensate into the laps of women whose faces were painted red from brow to chin. They never stop, never slow, and only with great courage and grace could a spirit slowly progress from car to car, all the way to the conductor's cabin, where all accounts cease, and no man knows what lies therein. In Hokkaido, where the snow and the ice are so white and pure they glow blue, it is said only the highest engineers of Japan Railways know the layout of the railroads on the floor of heaven. They say that these exalted engineers are working slowly, generation by generation, to lay the tracks to earth so that they mirror exactly the tracks in heaven. When this is done, those marvelous carriages will fall from the sky, and we may know on earth, without paying the terrible fare of death, the gaze of the red women, the light of the forest lanterns, and the taste of persimmon tea.

we neared Liverpool’s Lime Street station, we passed through a culvert with walls that appeared to rise up at least thirty feet, high enough to block out the sun. They were as smooth as Navajo sandstone. This had been bored out in 1836 and had been in continuous use ever since, the conductor told me. “All the more impressive,” he said, “when you consider it was all done by Irish navvies working with wheelbarrows and picks.” I couldn’t place his accent and asked if he himself was Irish, but he gave me a disapproving look and told me he was a native of Liverpool. He had been talking about the ragged class of nineteenth-century laborers, usually illiterate farmhands, known as “navvies”—hard-drinking and risk-taking men who were hired in gangs to smash the right-of-way in a direct line from station to station. Many of them had experienced digging canals and were known by the euphemism “navigators.” They wore the diminutive “navvy” as a term of pride. Polite society shunned them, but these magnificent railways would have been impossible without their contributions of sweat and blood. Their primary task was cleaving the hillsides so that tracks could be laid on a level plain for the weak locomotive engines of the day. Teams of navvies known as “butty gangs” blasted a route with gunpowder and then hauled the dirt out with the same kind of harness that so many children were then using in the coal mines: a man at the back of a full wheelbarrow would buckle a thick belt around his waist, then attach that to a rope dangling from the top of the slope and allow himself to be pulled up by a horse. This was how the Lime Street approach had been dug out, and it was dangerous. One 1827 fatality happened as “the poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body,” as a Liverpool paper told it. The navvies wrecked old England along with themselves, erecting a bizarre new kingdom of tracks. In a passage from his 1848 novel Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens gives a snapshot of the scene outside London: Everywhere

The day Hitler died, 10 percent of German railways were operational and the country was at a literal standstill. A year later, in June 1946, 93 percent of all German rail tracks had been re-opened and 800 bridges had been rebuilt. In May 1945 German coal production was barely one-tenth that of 1939; a year later it had quintupled in output. In April 1945 it seemed to Saul K. Padover, an observer with the advancing US Army in western Germany, that it would surely take the flattened city of Aachen 20 years to rebuild. But within a few weeks he was already recording the re-opening of the city’s tyre and textile factories and the beginnings of economic life.

One of the most ambitious men to exploit the timber trade was Hugh F. McDanield, a railroad builder and tie contractor who had come to Fayetteville along with the Frisco. He bought thousands of acres of land within hauling distance of the railroad and sent out teams of men to cut the timber. By the mid-1880s, after a frenzy of cutting in south Washington County, he turned his gaze to the untapped fortune of timber on the steep hillsides of southeast Washington County and southern Madison County, territory most readily accessed along a wide valley long since leveled by the east fork of White River. Mr. McDanield gathered a group of backers and the state granted a charter September 4, 1886, giving authority to issue capital stock valued at $1.5 million, which was the estimated cost to build a rail line through St. Paul and on to Lewisburg, which was a riverboat town on the Arkansas River near Morrilton. McDanield began surveys while local businessman J. F. Mayes worked with property owners to secure rights of way. “On December 4, 1886, a switch was installed in the Frisco main line about a mile south of Fayetteville, and the spot was named Fayette Junction.” Within six months, 25 miles of track had been laid east by southeast through Baldwin, Harris, Elkins, Durham, Thompson, Crosses, Delaney, Patrick, Combs, and finally St. Paul. Soon after, in 1887, the Frisco bought the so-called “Fayetteville and Little Rock” line from McDanield. It was estimated that in the first year McDanield and partners shipped out more than $2,000,000 worth of hand-hacked white oak railroad ties at an approximate value of twenty-five cents each. Mills ran day and night as people arrived “by train, wagon, on horseback, even afoot” to get a piece of the action along the new track, commonly referred to as the “St. Paul line.” Saloons, hotels, banks, stores, and services from smithing to tailoring sprang up in rail stop communities.

God made parents to be the guard rails on the twisting road of life. You need to be strong enough for kids to crash into over and over and over again. You must stay strong, so that your teens will learn to stay on track. Guard rails get dinged up. But if they work well, they preserve the young lives that run up against them.

About three blocks north, I found a train track, and began to follow it in the same direction I was going. The sun stabbed the immaculate white snow with a blinding glow, and I was thrilled to be a part of the show. The air was indescribably cold, but I was well insulated in my long dark wool coat. It absorbed the heat from the distant white dime of a sun which was rising in the southeastern sky but not getting much closer as it rose. Facing the icy dawn, my heart leapt with joy: I was free!  I slipped and slid and laughed on the icy rails. White was everywhere. The thick blanket made it impossible to read the terrain, especially the small details. After a time, I saw what seemed to be the perfect place to enter the freeway. There were no vehicles on it, I had seen none since I began walking parallel to it on the tracks, and that was more than an hour earlier. The entry ramp was less than fifty yards away. If I had wings, or maybe skis, I would be there in a heartbeat. When I took my second step, I was one hip deep in frozen powder; the other leg was awkwardly turned up the slope. Managing to bring the second leg down, it sunk up to the knee. As I put more pressure on it, I was now level again: both thighs hip deep in snow. I laughed at myself, then trudged forward, crawling out of the hole, slipping and landing on my face. It was both comical and frightening.

A man and his young son crouched in the woods just before sunset, out where Palm Beach County meets the Everglades. Their eyes focused on the train tracks a few yards away, a tight bend just past the clearing where Pratt & Whitney tests its jet engines. A shiny new Lincoln penny sat on one of the rails. “Why are we doing this, Daddy?” “To get a flat penny.” “What for?” “Because it’s fun!” A train whistle blew in the distance. “Here she comes! Get down!” The pair crouched and waited, the train growing closer. It was in sight before they knew it, nothing but a blur as it entered the bend and hit the penny. There was a harsh grinding of metal. The father and son watched in astonishment as The Silver Stingray jumped the tracks and twenty cars jackknifed down the embankment toward the swamp. “Daddy? Did we do that?” “How’d you like some ice cream?

We strolled to the end of the platform. We came to a man with a signal lamp and I saw that as he passed us he looked at a conductor standing on another platform and made a drinking movement with his hand near his mouth. We stopped past the end of the roof and looked at the sun. "You see the sun, Koekebakker?" The sun was especially clear, right in front of us, close by, bigger and redder than I had ever seen it. It almost touched the rails, it didn't flash brightly on things anymore, there was a dull glow only on the frosted windowpanes of the train shed to the right of the track. "You think I'm drunk?" I did indeed. "It doesn't matter, Koekebakker, when I'm sober I don't understand anything anyway." "Do you understand what the sun wants from me? I have thirty-four setting suns leaning against the wall, one on top of the other, all facing the wall. But every evening it's there again." "Unless it's cloudy," I said. But he wouldn't let himself be distracted. "Koekebakker, you've always been my best friend. I've known you since--how long has it been?" "Thirteen years. That's a long time. You know what you need to do? Do me a favor. You have a hatbox?" I didn't say anything. "Put it in a hatbox, Koekebakker. In a hatbox. I want to be left alone. Put it in a hatbox, a plain old hatbox. That's all it's worth." Bavinck blubbered drunkard's tears. I looked around helplessly. A man in a uniform with a yellow stripe on his cap came up to us and spoke to me. "I think it would be better, sir, if you took the gentleman home.

Outside, Ambo slogs through snow ankle-deep, making bloody tracks down the graded yard toward the box truck. Scanning the roundabout below, where the dirt utility road spills from the wood into the clearing. No movement. Nothing on approach. Only the snow that contours the turnabout, shaping itself against the trunks of the surrounding glade. Near the split-rail fence at the end of the back yard, Ambo stops and places the cooler at his feet. He lays the shotgun in a wide drift beside the last stile, working it in with his hands, using the snow to scour off the worst of the gore. The slush reddened like a confection. When he finishes, he puts the cooler under his arm, shoulders the weapon and continues the descent. His hands numb. The truck is ahead, blanketed from nose to tail, the drifts reaching halfway into the wheel wells. When Ambo reaches the cargo bay, he glances back over his shoulder. The red house, a cornice of snow gathered on the eaves. The red tracks—his own footprints—leading away. A red imprint roughed out in the shape of a gun on the side of the path.

For decades, Amtrak ran a long-distance train from Los Angeles to Jacksonville called the Sunset Limited. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina washed out the tracks from New Orleans to Florida. The service was never restored, and the Gulf Coast has been without rail travel for nearly a decade now.

Another scream and one of the students pointed down onto the track. Milton stumbled to his feet and saw her deliberately laid across the rails. It was an incongruous sight.

More than 700 million artillery and mortar rounds were fired on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, of which an estimated 15 percent failed to explode. Every year these leftover shells kill people—36 in 1991 alone, for instance, when France excavated the track bed for a new high-speed rail line.

careening off the rusty rails. I’m looking forward to it again, confident that it will be a success. I had begun dreading my own plan a bit. That’s a dangerous thing, dread. Dread is only a small step from the inclination to postpone something, which in turn is unpleasantly close to canceling it altogether. And, if you’re looking for it, you can always find a reason to do nothing, and then before you know it you’re sitting in your room staring out the window. Once you stop, you’ll never get on track again. Keep moving, both literally and figuratively, until you drop dead—that’s the motto.

Once again, infrastructure had set a limit on the pace of development of a new technology. But by the second decade of the nineteenth century, malleable-iron rails were beginning to replace brittle cast iron on the wagonways of England, and stone or wooden sleepers strengthened the roadbeds for heavy locomotives. With such improvements, Trevithick’s circular track on vacant land in London would open out into a network of fast, reliable transportation—but not before its inventors and engineers endured a final long haul of challenges and trials.

It’s nothing, Steve. I should get back to all this paperwork.” I nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ll talk to you later.” After visiting the mayor’s office, I went over to the blacksmith shop to chat with Bob. I found my friend hard at work in front of the furnace. He was smelting some iron ore that was just delivered from the secret mining location. “Did you get the mayor’s order for rail tracks?” I asked. Bob turned away from the furnace and nodded. “Yeah, it looks like your special armor will have to wait.” “That’s fine, I can wait.” “It’s a pretty large order, so you might have to wait a long while.” “Aw… I guess I don’t have a choice.” “Oh, I’ve been thinking about something.” “What is it?” I asked. “I thought of a cool name for your new extra heavy weapon.” “Yeah? You got a name for it?” Bob nodded. “Check it out…” I waited patiently. “The Diamond Destroyer.” “Ooooh… I like it!” I said. “It sounds super OP.

After the Second and Third Avenue Els were torn down, East Side property owners had prospered as brownstones, loft buildings, and tenements were replaced by high-rise offices and apartment buildings. The area east of Central Park between 59th and 96th Streets, known as the Upper East Side, became home to fashionable boutiques, luxury restaurants, and expensive furniture houses. With thousands of well-educated young professionals moving there, the neighborhood contained the greatest concentration of single people in the entire country.3 Even though the number of cars registered in the United States grew by 47 percent in the 1950s, New York City’s economy still relied on the subway in the early 1960s. During the 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. rush hour, 72 percent of the people entering the CBD traveled by subway, which could move people far more efficiently than automobiles. Each subway car could carry approximately one hundred people, and a ten-car train could accommodate a thousand. Since trains could operate every two minutes, each track could carry thirty thousand people per hour. By comparison, one lane of a highway could carry only about two thousand cars in an hour.4 Although Manhattan and the region were dependent on the rail transit system, 750,000 cars and trucks were entering the CBD on a typical weekday, three times more than had been the case thirty years earlier. Many New Yorkers expected the city to accommodate the growing number of cars. For example, the Greater New York Safety Council’s transportation division claimed that Americans had a fundamental freedom to drive, and that it was the city’s obligation to accommodate drivers by building more parking spaces in Manhattan. The members argued that without more parking, Manhattan would not be able to continue its role as the region’s CBD because a growing number of suburbanites were so highly conditioned to using their cars.5 In

We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we come in contact with the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere all at once, and that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere—"I am in Petersburg in my bed, in Paris, my eyes see the sun"—or to intend real beings wherever they are, borrows from vision and employs means we owe to it. Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, "exterior," foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are "simultaneity"; this is a mystery psychologists handle the way a child handles explosives. Robert Delaunay says succinctly, "The railroad track is the image of succession which comes closest to the parallel: the parity of the rails." The rails converge and do not converge; they converge in order to remain equidistant down below. The world is in accordance with my perspective in order to be independent of me, is for me in order to be without me, and to be the world. The "visual quale" gives me, and alone gives me, the presence of what is not me, of what is simply and fully. It does so because, like texture, it is the concretion of a universal visibility, of a unique space which separates and reunites, which sustains every cohesion (and even that of past and future, since there would be no such cohesion if they were not essentially relevant to the same space). Every visual something, as individual as it is, functions also as a dimension, because it gives itself as the result of a dehiscence of Being. What this ultimately means is that the proper essence of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence...There is that which reaches the eye directly, the frontal properties of the visible; but there is also that which reaches it from below—the profound postural latency where the body raises itself to see—and that which reaches vision from above like the phenomena of flight, of swimming, of movement, where it participates no longer in the heaviness of origins but in free accomplishments. Through it, then, the painter touches the two extremities. In the immemorial depth of the visible, something moved, caught fire, and engulfed his body; everything he paints is in answer to this incitement, and his hand is "nothing but the instrument of a distant will." Vision encounters, as at a crossroads, all the aspects of Being... There is no break at all in this circuit; it is impossible to say that nature ends here and that man or expression starts here. It is, therefore, mute Being which itself comes to show forth its own meaning. Herein lies the reason why the dilemma between figurative and nonfigurative art is badly posed; it is true and uncontradictory that no grape was ever what it is in the most figurative painting and that no painting, no matter how abstract, can get away from Being, that even Caravaggio's grape is the grape itself. This precession of what is upon what one sees and makes seen, of what one sees and makes seen upon what is—this is vision itself.

Heroprime said nothing. He closed his eyes and his hands began to glow. Suddenly the rails began to transform: strips of red and gold appearing on them. He’s turning the rails into powered rails, Spidroth realized. In a moment the entire railtrack was transformed into powered rails. A lever appeared next to Heroprime, and he pulled it. The redstone on the tracks glowed, and then the minecart reversed direction, rolling back up the slope at super speed. The pigmen and villagers in iron armor all cheered.  “Heroprime did it!” a villager yelled. Up the top of the slope, all the pigmen in gold armor began to panic and run away as the minecart with TNT sped towards

Once, for example, on a train going across Canada, I began talking to a man everyone was avoiding because he was weaving and slurring his speech as if drunk. It turned out that he was recovering from a stroke. He had been an engineer on the same line we were riding, and long into the night he revealed to me the history beneath every mile of track: Pile O’Bones Creek, named for the thousands of buffalo skeletons left there by Indian hunters; the legend of Big Jack, a Swedish track-layer who could lift 500-pound steel rails; a conductor named McDonald who kept a rabbit as his traveling companion. As the morning sun began to tint the horizon, he grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes. “Thanks for listening. Most people wouldn’t bother.” He didn’t have to thank me. The pleasure had been all mine.

During World War II trolley tracks ran down Central Avenue, the main street of the Jersey City Heights, before traveling off of the cliffs and continuing down to Hoboken on a high wooden trestle. At best, it was a hairy ride as it jostled around, nearly coming off of the rails. For some of us kids, it was exciting to hop onto the back of the trolley for a free ride, and then snap the cord to the electrical rod, which provided power from an overhead wire, when I wanted to get off. This would leave the conductor spewing a streak of profanity, as his trolley ground to a standstill. Departing the scene in haste, I would run and quickly disappear into the darkness, leaving him with the daunting task of getting the rod back onto the overhead wire in the dark.

Time and again, he imagined climbing the crumbling pylons of the bridge, folding his uniform neatly over the rail, and stepping naked onto the highway to let that roar take him down. After fifteen days, and with his mind made up, he was standing on the bridge when his phone rang. His woman, calling from Denver.

smoking and dozing next to the slow roll of the Los Angeles River. Through the misery of dry-heat days and blue-neon nights, he listened to the roar of traffic overhead and wondered how a man could shed the perilous weight of memory. Time and again, he imagined climbing the crumbling pylons of the bridge, folding his uniform neatly over the rail, and stepping naked onto the highway to let that roar take him down. After fifteen days, and with his mind made up, he was standing on the bridge when

And horse-stealing,” said the Water Rat, adding his mite. “And impersonating a washerwoman, and defrauding the rails, and horse-stealing—or did I say that already?” “You did,” said Beryl. “You did,” affirmed the Mole. “And there was a second motor-car theft, was there not? I cannot keep track.” “O, how thrilling!” said the Rabbit, her ribbons fluttering with excitement. “It is all exactly like the ancient Greeks!” “Ulysses?” Beryl said drily. “Very likely.” “O, Beryl.” The Rabbit looked reproachfully at her companion.

It was a glorious experience to travel by rail for the children and the panoramic views of Africa through the big glass window in the back of the last car were beyond description. It was just as you would expect it to be as described in a vintage National Geographic magazine, with springbok and other wild animals abounding. The distance is approximately the same as from New York to Chicago and took an overnight. Adeline and Lucia talked late into the night as the children tried to hear what was being said. There was a lot of catching up to do, but it had been a long and exhausting day and the next thing they all knew, was that it was the following morning and the train was approaching Cape Town, affectionately known as the “Tavern of the Seas.” When the train finally came to a halt, after being switched from one track to another through the extensive rail yards, the realization sank in that this was their new life. Kaapstad, Cape Town in Afrikaans, would be their new home and German, the language they had spoken until now, was history. A new family came to meet them and helped carry their luggage to waiting cars. All of these strange people speaking strange languages were uncles, aunts and nephews. An attractive elderly woman who spoke a language very similar to German, but definitely not the same, was the children’s new Ouma. However, to avoid confusion she was to be addressed as Granny. She lived in a Dutch gabled house called “Kismet” located in a beautiful suburb known as “Rosebank.” This would be their home until Adeline could find a place where they could settle in and start their new life.

For the most part, four-car self-propelled Budd railcars presently connect Santiago de Cuba with Havana on the Central line. The flagship of the system is a 12-coach train originally used between Paris and Amsterdam. Although buses competed with the railroad, they all became nationalized after the revolution. Attempting to prevent the decay of the Cuban system, British Rail helped during the 1960’s by supplying new locomotives. However, this slowed and eventually came to a halt after the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Eastern Bloc and countries that continued to be friendly with Cuba, such as Canada, Spain and Mexico, took over. During the past decade China, Iran and Venezuela became Cuba’s primary benefactors and suppliers. Cuba has had long-range plans to update and modernize its railroad system. These plans are presently being realized and the upgrading and modernizing of the country’s 26,000 miles of track and replacing older locomotives, including some steam engines, with powerful and modern diesel-fueled locomotives are becoming a reality. P

The Lums’ grocery was located on the corner of Bruce and Railroad Streets, next to the rail line. On one side of the grocery was the train depot and on the other side were two cobblers, a barber, a restaurant, and a laundry. Just south of the train depot, a short walk along the tracks, was the town’s ice plant. There, great slabs of ice were loaded into insulated boxcars. Fishermen, boots caked with the mud of the Arkansas, White, and Mississippi Rivers, heaved crates of buffalo and catfish onto waiting trains. Packed tight with ice, the fish then shipped up to Chicago, as many as three express carloads a day.

down their road, each way, wid a flag,” directed O’Brien to Casey, “and thin tear up their track. Cut off the rails six inches inside the highway line. Don’t ye get off the road on to the company’s ground, av ye value yer life. Get the thrack out av the way, an’ thin start the plows an’ scrapers. Dump the dirt in a long pile in the middle av the sthreet; don’t cover up anny av the Dubskys or Polowskys, but kape the dirt movin’.

As I sit alone in the dawn of the morning. The sun was creating the eastern sky. A rise in the wind, and in the distance a muffled rumble of a train. It takes my memories to a small over pass, the size is just right for a young child to hunch and pass under, to another level of protection. On the other side of the tracks was a whole other world for me and a few of my friends. The rail stretched below our property after a row of stubbly cedars is where it lie, running east to west double in its power both rails past by our home.

Like rails on a railroad track, darkness, and light would continue to race side-by-side until the coming of the Glorious One.

Ravi sat on his cot, leaning on a stack of pillows, and looked out of the window. The sun was setting. The grazing herd of clouds was gone. Soon it was dark, and the fantasy returned, the fantasy of the journey. The seedling house became a compartment in a train, and he the lone and imprisoned traveller. Dark wastes lay on either side; from them fleeting signs spoke to Ravi—a solitary firefly, a plodding lantern. The wheels moved along the track with soft, deceptive thuds. Then he heard the far rush of another track racing towards his own, the sorrow of another, futilely seeking comfort. The rails met for one moment, tumultuously, to part again. To race away into the many-mysteried night.

I keep this my dirty little secret for years, he was my true first, yet it was not the most romantic yet it was something, now looking back now how is the loser, it did it long before, yet it was with him so it was not cool, I never- ever said this to anyone, that he took me. Yet play around like that with a boy that was me, he wanted to know so I said okay. It was the first time seeing all that- you know, at least mine was real, and not like time two at a party. This thing is so high- I get sick of feeling so short at like four-foot, on top that I can see the world by looking down, and they are looking up at me, my mom and grandmother were all the same size also, if not shorter, or so they say. The car is old and dusty and looks like no one has been in it for years on the outside, it is just blacked and crusty, the only car other than the coal car behind the locomotive, and it too is rusted reddish orange. They used to have tripped over this thing and park it on the bridge, and you spent the night up in the stars, and so that is what we did on a big full moon night. In the big bed looking out the one side of all those old windows. The car and train sit here for there was a fire or something on that line, and this becomes the new home of the serving remanences about half a mile in, the train was going over and was near the end on the one said when the wind took it all down, and all the cars but one fall all the many feet to the ground below, yet it never steamed over again. There sits the old Pullman car. It's red and has black, with yellow writing on it, up till now I am not sure what it says. It was a custom car made just for spending the night on top of the linked- mountains. The train is all the same color for what I can make out, dating around the 1800s or so, that what my dad said anyway we and he were up here, oh so long ago. We both walked up to her and me on the left, tacking him on the right hand-woven tight. The grass tall the track worn, and feet sore, from the journey there. Over smaller yet high crossings that have known side rails. Inside you can see it is in touch, and all dark wood, I light one of the old lanterns, I thought down a towel, and we had juice pouches and P-P and J. Romantic- No! It’s all good, he tried. It wasn’t about that anyway. The bed is off to the back and looks like a five-star hotel room to us, there is a living room spot, where ass naked in the big old sofas… or next to it, we were playing house, and loving it. We were young but we feel- we were on the bed all night long. Looking out over… see the tree sway below. it was cold in the car, yet he keeps me warm, I was fogging up the windows, with my breath Moan it out in a sweet- yet sensual way, I was pressed upon it looking out as I was on top, he was looking up at me, yet I was looking out and at his eyes, at definite times. I even kissed the glass to leave something behind, I wonder if it’s still there, and my name is covered in the old wood, next to his.

There are 10 million bricks in the building, 27 miles of main and counterweight rails used for the tracks of the elevators, about 200,000 cubic feet of Indiana limestone, and 6,400 windows. The completed building contains 37 million cubic feet. The 210 columns at the base support the entire weight of the building.

I like trains and the romance of traveling by train. When you travel by train, you can’t go wherever you want to go; you have to stay on the train tracks (aka rails) and follow where they run. When you don’t have a choice of things to do or places to go, the decision to monotask is much easier. Therefore, I like to remind myself to Sleep on rails. Riding the rails (in the comfort of my own bed of course) from one point to another keeps me focused on sleep and prevents me from taking any side trips during the night.

All thought flew from my mind when he pulled the shirt from over his head, revealing the elegant sweep of his back, the hard-packed muscles rippling under smooth skin. Arms, chiseled like a god's, reached down and... "Oh, sweet baby Jesus," I murmured fervently. He pushed his jeans off and bared an ass that was, frankly, spectacular. Those tight globes flexed as he kicked the jeans away with one long leg. Turn away. Get out of here. I shouldn't look. I coveted my privacy, and I was blatantly watching Lucian strip naked. He deserved his privacy too. But I couldn't blink. I couldn't move. He was...glorious. My fingers gripped the railing, holding on tight. The light of the pool gave his skin an unworldly greenish cast. He rolled his shoulders...unf...and then dove in. The water rippled outward in his wake. I actually shivered with lust as I tracked him along the bottom of the pool, a pale arrow of flesh darting through the turquoise glow. Silently, he surfaced on the far side of the pool, then neatly turned to do laps. Perfect form. Long strong arms. Clean, steady strokes. Édith Piaf kept singing as Lucian set a steady but brutal pace. He went at it lap after lap. I grew fairly dizzy with rude thoughts about his stamina. The night was cool, but my flesh was hot. God, that water looked so good. I could practically feel it running over my fevered skin.

Why was it that people always got involved in one’s life? If only one could manage things on the principle of the railways! Parallel tracks⁠—that was the thing. For a few miles you’d be running at the same speed. There’d be delightful conversation out of the windows; you’d exchange the omelette in your restaurant car for the vol-au-vent in theirs. And when you’d said all there was to say, you’d put on a little more steam, wave your hand, blow a kiss and away you’d go, forging ahead along the smooth, polished rails. But instead of that, there were these dreadful accidents; the points were wrongly set, the trains came crashing together; or people jumped on as you were passing through the stations and made a nuisance of themselves and wouldn’t allow themselves to be turned off.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.” Henry David Thoreau

But for some industries, especially those that were essentially public utilities, privatization backfired, leading to costs far in excess of what they had been under national control. One notable disaster was British Rail, the country's railroad system privatized under Thatcher's successor, John Major... On October 17, 2000, a passenger train derailed on that line near the town of Hatfield, killing four people and injuring more than seventy. A government investigation found the track riddled with cracks, undermining its structural integrity. The report blamed Railtrack for failing to property maintain it, with several contemporaneous reports citing McKinsey's Project Destiny. Railtrack was soon renationalized.

So much depended upon the daft schedule of Trenitalia and the unions so imbued with whimsy and given to strikes. In theory, Trenitalia, the national corporation responsible for rail travel in Italy, is organized, codified, simple, and comprehensible. In actual lived experience, however, Trenitalia is chaotic, disordered, complex, and arcane. I’m sure there are some who understand the great mysterious force that is Trenitalia; the fascist conduttori, for one, and the persons who wrote Trenitalia’s adulatory Wikipedia entry, for another. To my thinking, the logic of Trenitalia was the worst kind of Italian disregard for rules. Even the Trenitalia website appears to have been created by workers who have a slender understanding of how humans think. It reads like it was written in Cyborg, fed through Google Translate into Italian, and slapped on to a webpage. More than one time, I’ve sat in the wrong Trenitalia car, taken the wrong train, or bought an online ticket for a trip other than the one I’d intended to take. And all this even before the trains mysteriously stop running because of a sciopero bianco, a work-to-rule strike, otherwise known as an “Italian strike,” when workers register protest by doing no more work than is mandated by their employment contracts. A butterfly flaps its wings in Chioggia, and a train running to Siena freezes on its tracks, such is the indescribable strangeness of Trenitalia. It’s a fascist adage: “Say what you like about Mussolini, but at least the trains run on time.” This was true neither in Mussolini’s day nor today. Trains exist and there are many, which makes Italy already superior to the car-logged, rail-beleaguered United States, but don’t set your watch by them. However predictable, Trenitalia’s inconstancy is an issue when you’re planning a perfectly orchestrated murder from 4,000 miles away. I raise the bureaucratic specter of Trenitalia because much of the success of Marco’s murder rested upon it. The remainder hinged on my skill with knives.

I remember a cat, maybe gray, possibly a tabby, brushing alongside me. Its whiskers were long. The steel rail felt cold to my fingertips, as did the shard of amber glass I did not see that sliced into my foot. I remember the sensation of falling, of hearing something crack in my rib cage, of landing on the tracks and not being able to breathe, and of warm liquid on my foot. Lastly, I remember trying to get up, but—like Gulliver—I was tied down. I tried to scream, but when I opened my mouth all I felt was a knife in my side, and all I heard was the horn of the train. I reached behind me, trying to free the belt loop from whatever held it, but couldn’t. I remember the blinding light of the train and the warmth in my shorts—I had seen what a train could do to a penny. Like a record that’s scratched, the soundtrack skips again, but I think I heard footsteps, maybe boots, because today I don’t so much see them as feel them. I saw a flash, a long shadow crossed over me, big hands wrapped round about me, and I felt the belt loop pop off like a shirt button. Another skip. I opened my eyes and saw the rusted underside of the train cars whizzing by just inches from my head. As the wheels screamed to a stop, they skidded against the steel rails and showered me with orange sparks that stung my cheeks.

Jersey City’s railroads were built by Irish immigrants, men from Con-naught and Munster who dug a crucial tunnel through the Palisades in the late 1850s, linking waterfront rail terminals with tracks laid in the meadow-lands to the west and the vast continent that lay beyond.

Their owners returned to Philadelphia each fall, leaving the resort a ghost town. Samuel Richards realized that mass-oriented facilities had to be developed before Atlantic City could become a major resort and a permanent community. From Richards’ perspective, more working-class visitors from Philadelphia were needed to spur growth. These visitors would only come if railroad fares cost less. For several years Samuel Richards tried, without success, to sell his ideas to the other shareholders of the Camden-Atlantic Railroad. He believed that greater profits could be made by reducing fares, which would increase the volume of patrons. A majority of the board of directors disagreed. Finally in 1875, Richards lost patience with his fellow directors. Together with three allies, Richards resigned from the board of directors of the Camden-Atlantic Railroad and formed a second railway company of his own. Richards’ railroad was to be an efficient and cheaper narrow gauge line. The roadbed for the narrow gauge was easier to build than that of the first railroad. It had a 3½-foot gauge instead of the standard 4 feet 8½ inches, so labor and material would cost less. The prospect of a second railroad into Atlantic City divided the town. Jonathan Pitney had died six years earlier, but his dream of an exclusive watering hole persisted. Many didn’t want to see the type of development that Samuel Richards was encouraging, nor did they want to rub elbows with the working class of Philadelphia. A heated debate raged for months. Most of the residents were content with their island remaining a sleepy little beach village and wanted nothing to do with Philadelphia’s blue-collar tourists. But their opinions were irrelevant to Samuel Richards. As he had done 24 years earlier, Richards went to the state legislature and obtained another railroad charter. The Philadelphia-Atlantic City Railway Company was chartered in March 1876. The directors of the Camden-Atlantic were bitter at the loss of their monopoly and put every possible obstacle in Richards’ path. When he began construction in April 1877—simultaneously from both ends—the Camden-Atlantic directors refused to allow the construction machinery to be transported over its tracks or its cars to be used for shipment of supplies. The Baldwin Locomotive Works was forced to send its construction engine by water, around Cape May and up the seacoast; railroad ties were brought in by ships from Baltimore. Richards permitted nothing to stand in his way. He was determined to have his train running that summer. Construction was at a fever pitch, with crews of laborers working double shifts seven days a week. Fifty-four miles of railroad were completed in just 90 days. With the exception of rail lines built during a war, there had never been a railroad constructed at such speed. The first train of the Philadelphia-Atlantic City Railway Company arrived in the resort on July 7, 1877. Prior to Richards’ railroad,

A writer's job isn't to change the directions of others' trains, but rather to re-imagine the tracks and paint empathy on the rails

The black-eyed man leaned on the rail watching, listening, and acclimating while he inhaled the brew of sea air and coal smoke. There was something else in the air, too; a deep note, buried far below the scents and sounds that stirred on the summer breeze. It would’ve been nearly impossible for anyone else to detect. Humans were notoriously blind to the simmer of violence—which always amused him, considering how like a drug it was to them. The freckled and black-eyed man, not being human, could smell it as sharply as cologne. It was pervasive here, just like it was everyplace else he’d been in this country in the last twenty years, at least. Maybe more. It was easy to lose track of the passing time. He was far older than the flashy young fellow he appeared to be.

something kicked in and whatever it was that had shut him down released him. He collected his thoughts. ‘Bury them,’ said Mitchell. ‘Bury them? Bury them?’ Maillé snorted. ‘We don’t have time for that! And with what? Our bare hands?’ ‘Down the track,’ said Mitchell. ‘We take them down to the sheds.’ ‘We can’t carry all these men, Pascal,’ said Bucard reasonably. ‘I know. Down at the shed, there’s a …’ he struggled to find the word he wanted, ‘A… handcar,’ he said in English, then remembered. ‘Voiture de chemin de fer.’ ‘And then?’ said Laforge. ‘Just do as I say,’ said Mitchell. * Hours later Waffen SS-Sturmbannführer Ahren Brünner pulled the goggles off his dirt-streaked face and stepped down from his open-top vehicle. He examined the area around the torn rail track – there was no other sign of damage. Behind him his motorized company stayed alert; some scanned the hills and trees in case of ambush. Men and vehicles were spread out tactically as his men searched the area. He took a good look around but the damage seemed minimal. ‘Major?’ one of his men called. He turned towards the soldier, who pointed to a group of his men halfway down the embankment in the trees where they had pulled aside the cut branches that had camouflaged the overturned

you are back in your grandmother’s attic looking at photographs of people you don’t know, ladies in floral print dresses, wearing feathered and veiled hats; men with cigarettes, leaning against automobiles, thumbs through their belt loops; an empty railroad depot, the tracks heading away to a landscape of bare trees, the rail yard littered with handcarts and piles of sooty snow, and you hear your mother calling you to lunch, but you are curious about this missing snapshot, the four triangular corner mounts forming a dark rectangle. Who removed the photo from the album and why? And who is the purloined ghost? And at that moment you realize that secrets lie all around you, that the world is so much larger than you had imagined, and that you are a part of it, and that this is a world of loss, and that all of these people whose names are penned on the borders of the photographs, whose smiles and shadows have been preserved, these people named Eustache and Marie, Walter, Pamille, Theona, Grace, Emma, Cousin Butchie, Big Fred, Little Fred, that all of them were tillers in the garden where the flower of you now blooms.

Tracks! Tracks! It seemed to the visionaries who wrote for the popular magazines that the future lay at the end of parallel rails. There were longdistance locomotive railroads and interurban electric railroads and street railways and elevated railroads, all laying their steel stripes on the land, crisscrossing like the texture of an indefatigable civilization. And in Boston and New York there were even railroads under the streets, new rapid-transit subway systems transporting thousands of people every day. In

Suppose that… you were sitting down at a table. The napkins are in front of you. Which napkin would you take? The one on your left or the one on your right? 'The left' is correct. But, in a larger sense of society, that is wrong. Perhaps I could even substitute society with the universe. The correct answer is that “it is determined by the one who takes his or her own napkin first. Yes? If the first one takes the napkin to their right, then there’s no choice but for the others to also take the napkin on their right. The same goes for the left. Everyone else will take the napkin to their left, because they have no other option. This is society… who are the ones who determine the price of land first? There must have been someone determined the value of money, first. The size of the rails on a train track? The magnitude of electricity? Laws and regulation? Who was the first one to determine those things? Did we all do it, because this is a republic? Or was it arbitrary? No! The one who took the napkin first determined all of these things! The rules of this world are determined by the same principle as “right or left?”! In a society like this table, a state of equilibrium, once one makes the first move, everyone must follow! In every era… this world has been operating by this napkin principle.

I stood in a stupor and would have continued to stand there were it not for a breeze that parted the smoke, revealing a sailor from the Vestal. It was Joe George. He had been following orders to cut the lines that tethered his ship to the Arizona so they could head to open waters. Since there was no one on the Arizona to help on our end, he was taking a fire ax and cutting the lines on his. We called to Joe through a seam in the smoke, motioning for him to throw us a monkey’s fist, which was a lightweight heaving line knotted around a metal ball and attached to a thicker rope. It was a long shot, but our desperate idea was that if we could secure a rope between the two ships, then perhaps we could make it to the Vestal. As Joe rummaged for the ball, I looked at my arms. A sheath of skin from each had peeled off and was draping them. I tore off one length of skin and threw it on the floor of the platform. Then the other. The remaining tissue was a webwork of pink and white and red, some of it black, all of it throbbing. But that didn’t matter. My focus narrowed to Joe George and the ball in his hand. He threw it, but it fell short. He gathered up the line and lobbed it again. Short once more. Joe was perhaps the strongest man in the harbor, an All-Navy boxer whom I described earlier as an “ox.” He was the only man with a prayer of getting that line to us—if he couldn’t do it, then it was impossible. The reality started to sink in: we were going to burn alive. Joe collected the rope once more. For a third time, he tossed it with all his strength. It sailed from one wounded ship to another, across flames, smoke, and carnage. I tracked it all the way and caught it in the air, pulling the smaller line until I felt the main rope. I tied the rope to the railing, cinching it tight, and Joe secured his end. The rope stretched seventy feet to span the water below us, which was forty-five feet down, slicked with fuel that had caught fire. Our only hope was to make it to the Vestal, hand over hand across the rope. But the flesh had been burned off all of our hands, and using those raw fingers and palms to get us across the chasm that separated us would be at best excruciating, and most likely impossible.

In Minnesota, they were seizing cars from every siding, from the Mesabi Range, from the ore mines of Paul Larkin where the cars had stood waiting for a dribble of iron. They were pouring wheat into ore cars, into coal cars, into boarded stock cars that went spilling thin gold trickles along the track as they clattered off. They were pouring wheat into passenger coaches, over seats, racks and fixtures, to send it off, to get it moving, even if it went moving into trackside ditches in the sudden crash of breaking springs, in the explosions set off by burning journal boxes. They fought for movement, for movement with no thought of destination, for movement as such, like a paralytic under a stroke, struggling in wild, stiff, incredulous jerks against the realization that movement was suddenly impossible. There were no other railroads: James Taggart had killed them; there were no boats on the Lakes: Paul Larkin had killed them. There was only the single line of rail and a net of neglected highways. The trucks and wagons of waiting farmers started trickling blindly down the roads, with no maps, no gas, no feed for horses—moving south, south toward the vision of flour mills awaiting them somewhere, with no knowledge of the distances ahead, but with the knowledge of death behind them—moving, to collapse on the roads, in the gullies, in the breaks of rotted bridges. One farmer was found, half a mile south of the wreck of his truck, lying dead in a ditch, face down, still clutching a sack of wheat on his shoulders. Then rain clouds burst over the prairies of Minnesota; the rain went eating the wheat into rot at the waiting railroad stations; it went hammering the piles spilled along the roads, washing gold kernels into the soil.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails,’” John quoted.

I had temporarily lost my way and then found it again, but I failed to understand that coming off the pre-ordained track of my life might have been what I really needed. I have learned that sometimes those moments of chaos, when life careers off the rails, hold important messages about things we need to change in our existence – and the rigid expectations that we, and others, have of us that we need to challenge – before it is too late. If we address these, we can start to move forward once more, towards achieving our own goals. If we choose the goals ourselves, we have a better chance of success.

So I’m pedaling along, doing pretty good, when I come to the train tracks about a block from our apartment. Remember, I’d had a beer or two at this point. Maybe eleven. So I start to get all wobbly and next thing you know, the front tire hits the tracks sideways, wedges into the gap by the rail and here I go right over the handlebars. I hit the ground, and look up and I see the nachos coming at me in slow motion. I can see the chips spinning in the air and the chili and cheese sauce separating into these big globs, and it’s like I’m in a bad kung fu movie. I couldn’t move. So the whole mess lands right on my chest. Cheese, jalapenos, chili, all that shit.

Riley wasn’t a gambler—nor was he particularly fond of the seedy scene at the track—but he had an Irishman’s passion for beautiful horses. He loved watching them run, their muscles rippling under their shiny coats, the flare of their nostrils as they reached top speed. To Riley, horses were the purest runners on earth, unburdened by human flaws such as vanity and egotism. He hated runners who showed up their opponents with their body language and facial expressions. He hated showmanship. Riley walked Jesse straight up to the rail, where together they spent the entire afternoon just watching the thoroughbreds run race after race. “Don’t talk, Jesse,” he said. “Watch.” And Jesse watched. He watched the horses as they galloped effortlessly down the stretch. He too couldn’t help but admire their form, the way it seemed that all their energy was expended but none wasted. Finally, after the tenth and final race, Riley turned to the boy and asked, “Well, what did you learn today?” “Well,” Jesse said, his hand still clasping the rail, “the way they move—the legs and the whole bodies of the horses that can get the lead and keep it—is like they’re not trying. Like it’s easy. But you know they are trying.” “And what about their faces?” Riley asked, getting to his primary point. “I didn’t see anything on their faces.” “That’s right, Jesse,” Riley said, lifting his bony finger to Jesse’s chest. It was an accusation. “Horses are honest. No animal has ever told a lie. No horse has ever tried to stare another one down. That’s for actors. And that’s what you were doing the other day. Acting. Trying to stare down the other runners. Putting your energy into a determined look on your face instead of putting it into your running.

The more things change, the more you wish they could stay the same. I like things on track. A railroad track, in fact. Humming right along, buzzing with a regular rhythm. Slip in a little adventure, sure. But don't flip a switch and send me down a different rail. The more things change, the less I like my direction.

Mybike handling qualities include on-a-rail tracking, almost as if the headset were too tight, and a high-strung, joyous agility. Frame geometry and construction integrity combine with the rider’s caffeine consumption level to produce serendipitously disparate handling characteristics.

He wondered who was driving the train and whether they were headed toward home or away from home. Did the engineer know where love goes when it dies, or how it was possible that hummingbirds can cross the ocean while words can fail to fly half a pillow's distance? And on those cold winter nights when snow obscured the tracks, did he ever lose faith? That the rails would still be there, that the bridges would hold, that there really was a Vermont, that there really was a train, and that the clickety-clack he heard wasn't just the sound of his own heart moving away from him in the night, growing fainter and fainter, beat by beat.

As avian diversity declined in the United States, specialist species like woodpeckers and rails disappeared, while generalist species like American robins and crows boomed. (Populations of American robins have grown by 50 to 100 percent over the past twenty-five years.)48 This reordering of the composition of the local bird population steadily increased the chances that the virus would reach a high enough concentration to spill over into humans.

Late at night, my friend Boris and I stood by the tracks and the train passed with orange lights in all its windows but not a single passenger head to be seen. Where are the passengers? I asked. The train is empty? Oh, they are there, you just don’t see them. They’re on the floor. There used to be snipers all along the tracks and so there are stretches of the rails where people all lie down on the floor so they won’t be shot.