Getting Home Again

Grey clouds filtered and altered the sunlight until the yellows and purples of the wild flowers seemed incandescent, scattered among the emerald green fields of new rice and dark mud while the air grew colder and seemed to fill with water as the train moved north.

A young mother with two small boys sat across the aisle from me.  The older pressed his nose to the glass and kept watch for other trains on the line, grabbing his mother's hand and saying "look, look!" whenever he saw one.  The younger boy sat on his mother's lap and looked around at the other passengers and myself.  He grinned at me, his face opening wide and his mouth falling open in a silent mouth.  I smiled back and nodded to his mother, who returned my nod and reached a slender finger under the boys chin to wipe up a drop of spittle that had fallen there.

I leaned back in my seat and glanced around the worn and tattered benches and seats lining the walls of the train, taking in the school girls in their short skirts and the young office ladies out for an afternoon of shopping, bags forming barriers around them like sandbags around a foxhole.  Scattered here and there were the men of the train: salarymen in dark suits and cigarette stains, high school boys in baggy pants and attitude, would-be gangsters in their bad perms and handbags.

My fingers left their place in between the pages of the novel I held closed over my hand and I placed the book in my bag.  The mother and her two boys stood up to exit the train as it pulled into station and I wished them luck getting home before the storm came.

A few minutes later and I too exited the train, rushing through raindrops that seemed to hang suspended in the air, neither falling nor splashing, listening to the thunder and smiling to myself, glad that I had decided not to drive that day.