“Figures!” A man in his thirties slapped a palm on the leather steering wheel of his Subaru Forester and began to scratch his beard as if nothing had happened.
“It’s fine, Ethan. It’s not like we’re in a rush.” Moira turned her face so Ethan wouldn’t see her rolling her eyes out the window as the gate arms of the train crossing came down in front of them.
He flicked the visor up and snorted. “Maybe you aren’t, Mo, but I’d like to get to work with enough time to grab a coffee! We’ll be here for ten minutes.”
He wasn’t wrong, but she hated when he called her Mo in anger. She ignored him and tucked copper hair behind her ear, pulling her book from the bag under her legs to read about a fictitious shop in Castle Rock, Maine.
“Yeah, you just enjoy yourself. I’ll just stare out the window,” he mumbled and trailed off. Moira knew the wheat trains were a crucial part of the local economy — Marshall Creek, known as ‘Cereal City’ for generations, produced several of the nation’s favorite sugary breakfasts. It also kept mouths fed in an area of the Midwest that had lost the lions’ share of economic opportunities when automakers exported their plants to other countries. This had left individuals without a way to make a living — not to mention a rash of abandoned buildings and homes. That is what brought the Hales to the area: affordable housing. It had been a challenging six months.
As she opened the book to the hand-stamped Handmaid’s Tale bookmark the Gen X bookshop owner gifted her last month, Moira saw someone coming down the hill past the train. An odd figure pushed past the branches struggling through the asphalt beside the grain warehouse in the center of the city. She had come to know things felt a little off here. Habits, priorities, attitudes — The way time had a habit of slipping through the cracks, she mused, her book forgotten.
He was tall and wiry. A shaggy mullet framed a sharp profile and large wire glasses. His eyes were cast to the ground as he took a drag of a cigarette; When he looked up to exhale he saw her. Moving with a strange grace, his limbs found sure footing over the gravel of the shoulder, navigating the roots of the kudzu and sumac along the roadside.
Something prickled at the back of Moira’s neck. He was wearing an oversized red Budweiser jacket that looked like it had seen better days. A relic of some past decade, but probably not one in which he’d ever been drinking a Bud, Moira thought as she noticed the scant hair on his upper lip. The butt of the cigarette (which he looked just old enough to buy) dangled from his lips, smoke trailing into the cool autumn air. For a moment, Moira’s mind glitched and thought the smoke was forming shapes: curving serpents, a ghostly train.
Moira blinked and shifted on the leather seat, glancing at Ethan. He was on his phone. She risked another look past the rushing train cars. The boy, still walking, wasn’t looking at her anymore, he was looking the direction the train was coming from. She followed his gaze: No end in sight. Moira looked at him again, just so her brain could have the satisfaction of seeing him stop.
But he didn’t.
He was still walking. He was staring right at her now. He flicked the butt away with a practiced ease, exhaled, and then he lifted one hand — just a simple gesture, like he’d seen an old friend across the street.
Moira watched, her heart pounding. She flushed as the figure marched on. Her eyebrows knitted together and she breathed in sharply as the young man disappeared beyond the tops of the cars. If Moira or Ethan had been more present in their surroundings, they would have noticed the dried orange leaves on the gravel shoulder around them start to shake, twitch, and rise. The necklace Moira was wearing with the small letter M pendant lifted imperceptibly off her sweater.
“What?” Ethan looked up from Instagram at his wife and then straightened up to look past the train. “Ah, finally.”
And just like that, the train was gone.
The dinging of the alarms quieted as the gate arms raised to join the blinking red lights as the train rumbled away. Moira gripped the book in her lap, looking around for the rest of the train cars. “But, it only just started…”
“I know, we really lucked out,” Ethan shifted into drive and slowed over the tracks. Moira slammed her novel shut and looked behind them, searching.
There! She took a deep breath. The boy marched on, hands stuffed in his oversized pockets, close to where they’d been parked. Their car passed him and Moira noticed a dangling earring behind the mulleted curls. Is that a smirk? As he walked past he gave a lazy nod, almost a wink, like they were in on the same secret. But Moira wasn’t in on the secret and she couldn't make sense of what had just happened. Yet there he went, disappearing into the city.
I would’ve sworn in court that train still had at least thirty more cars… Moira scowled alone sitting at her desk in a co-working space not fifteen minutes later. She shook her head again and laughed quietly to dismiss her moment of insanity.
Normally she worked from home but she had a conference call and the Hales were having some work done on their roof. Moira tried focusing on the reports for brands in her network but her mind kept trailing back to the boy: how cigarette smoke still lingered in the air behind him as they passed, though he’d long since discarded the chewed filter.
Her meeting ended early. Moira thought covetously about the coffee she had missed out on that morning, still in a daze after the train. She locked the rented conference room and headed to the café across the street.
Moira glanced quickly for traffic and opened her wallet as she crossed the street, rummaging for the right card. She lifted her foot but in her rush she must have misjudged and the curb just caught her toe, sending her card and license flying onto the sidewalk.
“Shit!” She cursed but caught herself on all fours, reaching for her card on the concrete. A hand reached down in front of her face and stopped her short. Crouched on one knee, she followed the wrist, clothed in red windbreaker fabric, up the arm to a face. “You!”
The mulleted Budweiser fan smiled. Moira narrowed her eyes, ducked around the hand to snatch up her bank card. Another hand appeared, dangling her driver’s license in front of her. Annoyed, she took the wizard’s offer of help and plucked her license from him.
“Thank you,” she sighed. “Although I don’t know how I tripped, I thought I—” Moira had been pointing behind her with one hand and brushing the knee of her pant leg with another. Slowly her eyes met the boy’s.
“Sorry, I wanted to talk to you before you got to the café,” he grinned. There was the smallest gap between his front teeth. It made him look more impish. “I thought I saw you earlier. In the car.”
The quotidien lunch rush disappeared around Moira as she realized the boy had moved the curb, like he had the train. “You did that?”.
“No harm done!” The boy shrugged and backed up a few steps.
“Wait!” Moira held up a hand and the boy flinched backward, hands over his face. Something dark passed over it but she couldn’t tell what. “I’m sorry, I just—”
Too late. The boy dropped a skateboard from behind his back and took off between the people that reappeared in Moira’s perception. Another nine-to-fiver bumped lightly into her, passing by.
“Excuse me!” He held the accepted single hand gesture of apology and continued into the café Moira had been headed for.
When Moira looked back down the street the boy was gone. How did he know I was going to the café just now? Her head spinning, she quickly returned to her conference room before her next call. She rubbed a throbbing spot on her temple.
In their home that night cooking dinner, Ethan poked the paring knife he was using to cut the woody ends away from the asparagus spears to point at the Echo Show.
“Pretty lucky, Mo,” he popped an olive in his mouth and resumed his chopping duties.
Moira closed the oven door on the salmon and stood motionless at the counter. The throbbing in her head returned as she watched a news story about a shooting in the café.