The Train Yard

The young girl, wandering the train yard in late afternoon, goes there often. She isn’t afraid of the rabid dogs that sleep behind the old grain elevator – she pets them and they sit with her when she cries. The setting sun always makes her hair look orange and she imagines it is a fire, but it does not hurt her so she cuts her arms with a shard of glass left behind from the drunk who got hit by the train last night. She gathered up the remaining colored pieces in a small pouch and saves them. Sitting in an abandoned boxcar with the pouch in her lap, the shards poking through to her thin legs that dangle off the edge, she chews her finger nails and watches the sun slip below the fields beyond the train yard, while the dogs lick the blood from the rails.









©Shelley Marie 2012