Genesis 4: The Platform

• Dayna Mortimore, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2016

On Tuesday a man boards an early train, and his life erupts with violent colours.
It is a dismal hour of the morning. The kind of hour where leeching tunnel-dwellers breathe poisonous air, and the phantom sounds come rolling in. Everywhere--everything--is footsteps now. The man, who doesn't remember his name, is standing completely still.
There are three things he remembers. Foremost concepts.
First: the shoulder trees.
He reaches a trailing hand to brush dust off of his coat, and in the still room, he thinks only of the forest. Hospital, then suburbia. Noise and silence, reversed. He lives in the city now. Where once he was a breathing tree he is now simple lumber at an arbitrary height. His younger brother, who had tangled fingers through his hair, sticky (like his forehead is now), lives below the station gravel. Here is a breathing kingdom of metal, twisting itself like branches. A forest of bricks. An airless place where all manners of skeletons rest underfoot, waiting for the man to grow cold.
Staining his tongue now is the second thing he remembers: the Tuesday men. They come in lots of two and they march, march, and don't stop marching. He hears them at his door, surrounding his bedroom. At night when he tries to sleep he hears their fists pounding against flimsy wood. He hears their shoes scraping up mountainsides, clawing for a pinnacle that has already begun to cave in. Deep red, running in rivulets through his fingers, down his wrists. Pooling in the crooks of his elbows. Red had stained the carpet, his face when he had touched his brother, starry curtains he had slipped shut and ears when he had blocked out the stomping Tuesday men. Here is the thing about mountains: when in need of a weapon, a rock will suffice.
The third thing he remembers is the book of stories.
He remembers a story about brothers. He can’t remember which name is his, only that it tasted like blood in his mouth. Now he can bite each syllable of it, their names together: CainandAbel. AbelandCain. The vibrations beneath his feet, the rushing train.
The footsteps on the platform go silent. It must nearly be sunrise.
Today, he thinks, he will board.
Time lapses and for a moment he rises, breathes, and the shoulder trees are alive. The Tuesday men lull and he is looking into eyes that still shine, and search, and he is hearing one word: why.
Why? The man upstairs told me to.
His father watches from the staircase as the Tuesday men make the walls fall down. He comes crashing to his knees like a wave, beating his fists against the carpet while the tide comes in and chokes them all, and stands once he feels the absence of breath. Face downcast, he breathes in the memory.
Sitting in the field, his brother's keeper, his blood running and crying out from the ground.
He stops wandering. The train is here again.