A Story Beginning

 There were four people in the train cabin at the time, only four because the tall man with the beard had left ten minutes earlier for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. The group had practically forgotten about him at this point, what with all the confusion, but his bags sat neatly under theirs, his newspaper still on his seat. He had read this newspaper with undue seriousness in the hour before, while casually glancing to his right at the pretty young woman by the window. No one had judged him, but they all noticed it. The cabin felt a little bigger without him in it, and the older woman across from him had stopped fanning herself, and the pretty girl had sat up a little straighter, but in the end they didn’t even remember he’d been there until much later. 

The young woman had vivid red hair that was pinned up securely, and she wore a blue sleeveless dress with elegant little white gloves. People looked at her and forgot for a moment that it was not actually summer, but the chilly beginnings of a rainy spring, and women looked down at their own black jackets and jeans and wondered why they too were not wearing little white gloves and summer shoes. The reason, of course, was that they were sensible and dressed for the weather, and no one can blame them.

The cabin was comfortable and fairly spacious, everything done in primary colors. The seats were a bit faded, but they were wide and comfortable, and the cabin smelled faintly of coffee and someone’s pleasantly floral perfume. Eliza, the beautiful redhead, sat primly on the edge of her seat, unable to relax or think about anything but her upcoming destination and the eyes boring into her, which she refused to acknowledge. It never ended. She stared outside the window, seeing nothing.

The boy across from her in the train cabin was perplexing, because he did not look at her at all, except when he put her bag up and she thanked him with a smile. He must have been young, although maybe his freckles may have made him look younger, and he wrote vigorously in a leather notebook as if ideas were coming to him in an endless stream and he was desperately trying to capture them all down on paper.

He wrote like this while the young woman stared out the window, and the older woman next to him read a book about birds, until all at once there was a high, keening noise that was like acid on the ears, and suddenly his neck snapped back and he lurched onto the seat in front of him as the train lurched on the tracks. The lights flickered, and everything was shaking and in a moment of utter panic he thought “I knew it would end like this, before I could finish.”

And then there was the ground. Pain in his arm.

The face of an angel bending over him.

There was a fourth person in the train cabin. She had sat squished against the far wall, having been too late to get a window seat, and no one had noticed her slip in except the kind gray-haired woman reciting birdsong in head, who had noticed the girl’s lack of luggage and felt mildly curious for about a millisecond before forgetting it all together. The girl had sat with a straight back and wide eyes, and plugged in her earphones just like any other teenager would, and held her own hand as if used to having her hand held. She looked like a girl utterly lost, doing something she almost already regretting. This was not true in Jade’s case, but that was what it looked like. Now she bent over the boy in concern, her hands hovering around his head in worry, wondering why no one else seemed to be concerned about the fallen boy.

Screams echoed along the train. Men ran down the passage and peered into rooms, some desperate, others demanding. Some looked for wives, or for doctors, or for information. Some were indignant and angry, simply looking for someone to shake their fist at, add to the pandemonium. Eliza watched them from her seat, a huge welt rising on her head where it had hit the thick glass of the window, and wondered why men always thought they could fix these kinds of things; they could run around all day and not find any answers, yet still they ran, just for something to do. She put her face in her hands.

“Excuse me?” The young girl with her hood up was addressing Eliza, who looked up and blinked. “Yes?” Eliza answered, but was immediately distracted. Everything appeared so clear and vivid in this moment, every color intense. The girl’s eyes were a rich, deep brown in a milk-white face, flushed with a heavy pink on her cheeks and nose like a bad sunburn. The red of the wall practically took her breath away, the blues sang one long bright note and when her eyes hit the older woman, her hair was too white to bear. She tried to concentrate on the eyes and the hood, tried to ignore the rising chorus of colors.

“Please, he won’t answer me-- I don’t know what’s wrong with him.” The boy moaned a bit, and Jade snapped her attention back to him. “Are you hurt?” She felt sick. His arm was twisted oddly under him.

 He moved his other arm up to his face, wincing. “It’s my… arm… it hurts…”

“Can you move it?” He tried and scrunched his eyes shut and groaned. Jade felt dizzy, but she took off her jacket and put it under his head.

At that moment, a man walked through the doors. He was average height, average build, wearing a big blue coat. He couldn’t have been more than 30, with light hair and a square face. He glanced around once, calmly, as if merely looking for someone who he’d lost in a crowd, and after locking eyes with each of them in turn, he walked out.

Each person had a brief thought about the man, and then let it go. Jade thought, “What if he had been a doctor?” He had looked like a doctor. Benjamin thought from the floor something wordless and wistful, vaguely related to the man’s sturdy boots, which was all he could see. Eliza thought that his eyes were exactly the same color as the bird on the front cover of the old woman’s book, which was dark blue, and she wished she had someone to tell this to. Katherine Bower, hitherto referred to as the “older woman,” simply thought “what a handsome man.”