Rail & River

• Timothy Gao, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2008

Long before we realised our teachers existed outside the school, we had one we all agreed was ‘off the rails’. He played songs nobody understood, ditched worksheets for meandering walks, and it seemed to us that everything he did spun far away from the line of best fit (ruled neatly, pencils only). We thought him lost, and imagined him in that picture where the rails ran through the desert; we rode towards the sun whilst he stumbled out the frame.

One of the last times we saw him was during school camp, three days of challenging our comfort zones with the muddy smell of grass and heinously bad food. That last night he took us for a walk at seven p.m., which was novel because it was a different world from the a.m. when you go past the protection of tungsten filaments, and into the dark blue. Some people brought torches, but the crazy-teacher made them put it away. The animals would wake, he said, but nobody saw any.

Except one. In one of the narrow paths, squeezed between the trees, was the skull of a cow. It was remarkably well preserved, until I trod on it (being without a torch) and its tooth chipped off. From where I stood, it looked like an offering – an ivory coin generously thrown, or an unlucky Mayan child. I rescued it from beneath the looming shape of the skull, into my pocket, where it felt smooth and cold and yet somehow seeping with a secret warmth.

The teacher stopped and arranged us, a small circle in the trees like pagans. I wondered if the cow had been a part of this ritual. Sitting down on the dirt (“but dirt is dirty!”), he closed his eyes and said, “Can’t you hear the river?” And then we could, because all at once it flushed down our ears, suddenly overwhelming when we hadn’t noticed it before. His job done, he led us back again.

People were unnerved. Somebody said he was completely mad, and at the third wave of agreement I joined in too. But over the metallic clacking of my classmates’ teeth, I could hear the pounding of the river where my heart should be. It followed me well past when the other fell asleep, in the middle of the darkness with only me awake. Every sound was like needles; and my fever-skin could taste, the small brushes of my clothes on my body.

The morning came with the buses, and in the belly of that warm steel I could let go.

It never came again until many years later, when I was grown enough to wish I wasn’t. That first time my heart was broken I was so okay, until I nicked my finger on a savage childhood relic and dared to hear the old rush. With a warm glass of bitterness rolling in my stomach, I cried happily to sleep because I could.

Because the heart only rusts on the railroad.