The Patchwork Train

Tucked into a little gully there’s a yard filled with old trains. Steam engines gone all rusty and a collection of some of the cars that were towed behind them once. Where there isn’t rust on them, there’s spray paint, in most of the places there’s both. Early on a winter’s morning the fog hangs low and gives the air a milky look. There’s a shed in the middle of the yard and already it’s starting to echo with clangs of metal and the sparks of a welder as the old man who lives there plays with the parts he’s stripped from the dinosaurs rusting outside.

Lights slowly come on through the windows of the houses scattered in the area around the yard. It’s not a densely populated part of the town, on the fringe really. In the houses the people are reluctantly getting prepared for their commutes, it’s business as usual, another cold morning to fight through.

The silence is broken quickly though. A cracking sound rings out, loud enough to wake anyone who was still winning the battle with the alarm clock. The sound bounces around and slowly makes its way up out of the valley, it almost wanted to hang around with the fog and make a party of it, but physics has its way and eventually the ringing ends.

People rushed from their houses and down towards the old man’s yard. A dark grey plume of smoke waved the flag for help. There must have been a dozen of the neighbors accumulated at the shed, all in differing stages of readiness for the day ahead, shirts un-tucked or dressing gowns wrapped around bodies that were still wet from the shower. They all looked into the shed and then at each other. Back and forth, looking for some kind of explanation or at least recognition of the strangeness of what had happened.

There wasn’t any sign of the old man, that was the first thing they looked for. But once it was clear that he wasn’t around, they started to piece together the rest of the scene. There were train tracks leading into the shed, designed to get the old beasts in to work on. The tracks were now glowing hot, smoke was rising off them. On top of that oddity was the obvious elephant in the room, the fact that the elephant was completely missing from the room. You see the old man kept one old steam engine in there, away from the corroding elements. It was his pride and joy, the thing that he scavenged for and pulled apart the others to repair. It had always been in his shed because it hadn’t existed before he’d pieced it together from whatever good parts he could find.

Now the patchwork train was gone and the only thing left in the old man’s shed was a smoking railway track that led to nowhere.