Flash Fiction And Short Stories

3. In a train

When I open my open my eyes this irritating darkness from before immediately comes striking back, and the air feels so thick that I can barely breathe.

Confused of whether I should keep my eyes open or closed, I sit up on my knees trying to feel what's on the ground around me. My fingertips hesitantly glide over the splintering wooden floor on which I must have passed out soon after we had entered the tunnel.

I can feel the warmth of breathing and shivering bodies close to mine, but somehow I cannot move any further as the jerky rocking movements of the train keep me stuck to the ground. Or maybe I am just too weak.

Usually, my eyes adjust to darkness within seconds, but this time I feel completely disorientated and lost. I must have hit my head when I fell from that box.

Suddenly, a sharp white light brightening up the small carriage, revealing an uncountable pair of horrified eyes, with the whole machinery abruptly stopping, and, a pile of pale bodies shooting towards me, before something hits my temple, and I black out again, fading away, to the mechanic sound of a man screaming, back into the darkness.

- - - - - - -

The sun stood especially low on that day in 1943 when it was shining on the row of rotting cattle cars being pulled across the dry landscape by a massive steaming construction of steel.

A line of eight carriages which, if gazed at from afar, appeared as elegant and fierce as a snake slithering towards its prey.

If you now were to find yourselves in respective hearing range of the railway when the train passed, you would distinctively hear passing waves of mourning and occasional screams of terror that, if only for the blink of a few seconds, filled the serene silence with a tension that you would feel deep inside the marrow of your bones, even long after the waves would have faded.

And without understanding you would know. For inside the carriages were not beasts but humans. Piled on top of each other, like sardines in a tin, in racks of rotten wood that had not seen a ray of sunlight in what seemed to be years.

Laying in darkness on hay and their own faeces, no one knew what their next destination was, but some became acquainted with the dark.

In a shabby corner of the last car lay a little girl unconscious next to a pile of boxes. Little did she know that she was one of the luckier passengers who had to share the space with only twelve others.

She had sat half asleep, as if in trance, against the wall on one of the parcels when a nightmare had pulled her off the box deeper into an even darker place. But no one did anything, because it did not matter.

It did not matter who they were and if they had known each other, for what mattered was that they were sharing the very same ride into the same darkness.