This time it was somewhere between New Mexico and Nevada. Chugging along at 80 miles per hour, the trains' whistle bellowed him awake.
He could feel the sandy air crawling around his skin; finding its way up his ankles, across his chest, enter his nostrils and down again through the entrails. It sat in his stomach like a diseased brick. He had been sleeping all day, but still found himself feeling sunburnt and exhausted.
What little clouds the desert had that night clung on the power lines in a desperate loving embrace. The moon's permanent, twisted, howling face lay full and judgemental far beyond the arid hell that had enveloped both the train and the man inside.
Grasping the bottom of his Levi's pockets in search for a lighter was when he felt it. Thin and worn between his fingertips, his digits slid comfortably into the grooves of where he had held it time and time before. Every atom in his body stopped moving as suddenly as he realized what he had found. He slowly pulled his hand out of his pocket as if the folded up photograph was the hunter and he it's prey, all the while convincing himself to not let it sail out the open train car door. As much as he wanted to let it go; he couldn't. He hesitantly unfolded it and the second it was free, he knew what he had really opened was Pandora's Box.
There she sat. Even if there was no light to resonate off the moon, her face would still be illuminated, and strongly resonate through any viewers ribcage and twist their heart into a knot. Her long brown hair coiled softly around her throat while her cloudless green eyes happily stared out through the cellophane. Her skin was smooth and pale, and looked as soft as the field of wildflowers she sat amongst. The color of her dress matched the sadness in his heart. Memories came washing back as fast and hard as the tide of the Atlantic crashed onto gnarled jetties.
He lost his job a few weeks back, and gambled the rest of their savings away at casinos and liquor stores. The baby cried, while he got off in the crusty yellow motel room down the street with another pair of tits. Blonde, red, or brunette; it never mattered to him. The baby went hungry while he heated up a spoon, and tied another balloon. She said she'd leave if he didn't clean up his act. He never believed her. She needed him too much, was what he thought. On a muggy Thursday evening he pulled up to their house in his brown beat up Buick, from losing another hundred dollars at the race track. The house was dim, and all too quiet. The front door was left unlocked; luckily for him since he couldn't even begin to recognize which one of the four keys on the ring were to his house, in his extreme inebriated state. Flicking on the lights, his heart sank. All that was left in the room was a yellow note curling on the dusty wooden floor.
" You have failed both me and your daughter not only as a functioning, loving parent, but as a human being. I would never want our daughter to know a man like you her entire life, and in turn you have lost your right to know her. You are lower than the rat on the food chain."
Flipping the note over, he realized the only paper she could afford to leave behind, was the back of a photograph of herself sitting in their yard. The picture was taken the day they moved in together. Stupified, he stumbled back out the front door and passed out in the holly bush underneath the living room's bay window, puking the whole way down.
Shaking his head to free himself from his thoughts, the train bobbled along the tracks even faster. Sick at himself, he lay his right hand palm down against his chest; the photograph of her wedged between. With his left hand he reached in his other pocket and found his green lighter. There was a quarter of whiskey left in the bottle he had been carrying with him, and he emptied it out onto himself. Already in agonizing pain from how he had destroyed everything he had ever cared for in his entire pathetic life, and realizing that the only thing he couldn't lose was his broken heart, he knew this wouldn't hurt a bit. Lifting his right hand to his face, he kissed the photograph, folded it back up, and let it nestle in the well of his palm.
The family of jack-rabbits that lived along the tracks looked up as they heard the train passing by, and continued to munch on whatever desert vegetation they could find. They sat as eyewitnesses to the yellow-orange glow of the third to last car. Black smoke curled around the top of the open train door, and flames licked the lips of the roof. It caught on fire almost as instantly as the man inside.
Once the train had passed, the smell of a deer carcass roasting in the desert sun lingered, although the minutes were catching up to midnight. The rabbits continued to gorge, as the scent made them salivate each time they stopped chewing to catch their breath.
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