gasoline colours

A cold spell descends. Even cows look fearful. Watching gasoline colours frozen in puddles, thoughts tumble out, my mind empties. A bird escapes from a bush, a flurry of white, rime departs brittle leaves, sparkling in sunlight. Slow. Beautiful. Silent.

This is how I feel today, skin tingles, nerve ends pinch, a bird in flight on a frosty morning.

On fences sit galaxies, ice particles stacked improbably upon one another, a brush of the hand and there’s hundreds more, another and thousands, one more and nothing. I step from dirt to gravel, feel edges beneath my sole. The tracks, once gunmetal blue, now turn to rust, though still they lay perfectly parallel, still, so exact amongst all this randomness.

Thick wooden slats pass under my feet, interspersing bedrock, stained all shades of oil-black. Sleepers anchored to earth by weathered iron pins, curled over like piglets tails, each seemingly identical, made weary once by giant hammers, swung by calloused hands, long before I was born.

I look up, I see Ally. She signs, “It’s perfect here.”

I reply, “Don’t come here enough, let’s come tomorrow too.”

I see her laugh.

The sky is limitless, faultless, not a cloud, not even a plane’s sayonara jet stream, just an alabaster sliver of moon and immaculate winter sun.

Thoughts slowly tumble back in, one by one, none of them a worry. The day’s serenity is pervasive.

Suddenly I feel a movement, vibrations, through my feet, my spine, quickly up to my neck, so quick. Ally’s waving, frantic, shouting, her mouth twisted - and everything turns to slow motion. A bird caught in frost and light.

I turn. A train. One meter away. I never knew.