The Cartography of Children

There was a train that only arrived at stations nobody lived in anymore, and inside the third car sat a throat that swallowed words before they were spoken. The throat belonged to no one, but everyone on the train recognized it as their own. It came through twice a week, and some mornings the platform was wet with dew, some mornings with the sound of backwards singing in B-flat—the sound tasted like copper and looked like the number 7. The conductor wore a uniform from a year that hadn't happened yet, and his fingers kept falling through the air like rain that remembered it was supposed to be up.

Inside, there was always one passenger reading a newspaper with tomorrow's date, but the articles were written in reverse, so all conversations happened in the future and people understood what they would say by listening to the silence today. A woman planted her shadow in the garden between the cars, and it grew teeth that whistled lullabies to the grass. The grass forgot how to be green and became instead a kind of longing-soft, aching, the color of a thought you can't quite finish. People got off at different stops than where they'd gotten on, confused about whether they were traveling or being traveled through.

The man made of mirror fragments found the woman made of backwards time, and they had a child who was born old and died as an infant and lived sideways through all the moments in between. The child spoke in photographs. The photographs spoke back in the language of rust. One passenger found a ticket stub for a journey she'd never taken. Another discovered his reflection in the window wearing clothes he'd buried years ago. The landscape outside began to repeat itself-same birch tree, same fence, same child waving, same throat humming in the same field.

By the time the conductor aged into dust, the throat had swallowed the entire alphabet, and now words could only exist in the space between saying and unsaying. The train kept moving through towns that looked like photographs of towns, going in circles, carrying people who could no longer tell if they were passengers or if they themselves were being read by someone else's newspaper. Some say the train is still running, the throat still opens in the dark, chewing on conversations that haven't happened. The tracks remember nothing. The passengers remember everything and nothing at once. The whistle sounds at three in the morning, calling to stations that erased themselves. The silence grew teeth. The meaning dissolved into the shape of a question mark that forgot what it was asking. The destination arrived long before anyone boarded, and everyone is still on their way there, dying and being born in the same moment, forever catching the same train home.