After walking to the very end of the platform, to the very last car, Vera slides into the very last row of seats. The seats that faced backwards from the way the train was moving. Most people get sick from backwards motion, but really, Vera preferred it this way. She always does this because the last car is always empty, and Vera needed to be alone for this journey. Vera shoves her bag into the overhead, and plops down next to the window. She is clammy; she had to speed walk from the parking lot to catch the final train this evening, to a place she very much did not want to go. As the train begins pulling out of the station, Vera rests her forehead on the cool window, watching as they exit the blackened tunnel and enter the night beyond. The time was 9:57 pm and she wouldn’t reach her destination until the early morning, 5:15 am or so.
Vera is startled by the train whistle, not realizing she had fallen asleep against the window, and hits her head against the glass. She closes her eyes and sighs, an oncoming headache imminent, she thinks to herself. She glances down at her phone, 11:03 pm, it’s barely been an hour. This is going to be a long night. Vera wishes they would turn off the lights in the car so she could fall back to sleep, and so the night could go by as quickly as possible. Although maybe she didn’t want it to go by too quickly, the end of this trip was the beginning of something much more painful and tiresome.
The night outside the window is inky black, they’ve already passed outside of city limits and now they are trekking through the countryside with no stops at all. No one else boarding, and no one leaving, at least not until her final destination.
Vera takes off her jacket, the car is still very warm, and rolls it up to use as a pillow. She again leans against the window, now with a bit of cushion so she doesn’t knock her head a second time. Staring into the darkness, something catches her eye. She blinks a few times, focusing her vision and realizes that what she is seeing is the reflection of a man in the car with her. That’s strange, she could have sworn she was alone. He must have come in when she fell asleep.
The man is wearing a long, tattered brown trench coat, and a dark wool Deerstalker cap- not quite as charming as one would imagine Sherlock Holmes looking. It was odd, the man was not sitting in a seat. He was standing at the opposite end of the car, facing the corner.
Vera was watching him through the reflection in the window, wondering what the man was doing, why he wasn’t sitting. How long had he been there? That’s when she heard…was he pissing on the floor? She watched as his shoulders relaxed and heard him zipper up his pants. She quickly averted her eyes from the man in the reflection as he turned, hoping he wouldn’t catch her. She pretended to be asleep as she felt him stalk to the back of the car, almost ghost-like, towards where she was sitting. Please no, the entire fucking car is empty, she thought to herself.
The man chose his row, behind Vera but diagonally opposite of her. Why did he have to sit so close? She could smell an odor wafting over from him, stale cigarettes and something that reminded her of the musty mop head when she would have to clean the floors at the end of her shift at the restaurant. The smell of a dirty, wet, overused sponge. After a moment, Vera realized that added to the stale cigarette smell was freshly burning tobacco as well. The man lit a cigarette and was smoking in the train car. Fucking hell of a journey this was turning into.
Vera turned closer towards the window, trying to sink as far away from the man as physically possible. She pulled her sweater up over her mouth and nose, and was tempted to pull her knees into her chest, but decided against it. She pulled out her wireless headphones to drown out the situation around her, only to realize that they were dead. Wonderful.
Needing to use the toilet, she turned her head around trying to catch a glimpse of the man. She didn’t want to leave her bag alone with him in the car, but she really had to go. She’d have to wait until he fell asleep before she’d attempt getting up. Vera settled back in, hoping that time would come soon.
