The Yard

            Each of Leon Petrovsky’s days were ponderous replays of those that came before, like the endless parade of lumbering elephantine boxcars outside his dirty office window. One after another, a monochromatic freight yard tableau of corroding steel under a remorseless Illinois sky taunted him in the yard house at his painted metal desk. His eyes were gray. Even the untrimmed hairs protruding from his ears and nose seemed to be an outgrowth of the creeping arthritic tendrils in his graying bones.

            His time on the yard forced him here, the logical next step in a trainman’s career if engineer or brakeman wasn’t an option. His body could no longer take the punishment the young gandy dancers continued to tolerate. They were so much like his son, and were for him beneficiaries of the anger triggered by that painful reminder. Especially Noles, the twenty-four-year-old switch tender with aspirations like his own. He wants to be on the trains. Well, so did I, thought Leon. He’ll put in his time just like everyone else.

            Joe Noles complained that his job and boss were sapping his youth and vigor, the drone of a much older man, as if his days were numbered. When he headed to work at the yard, he left the care and comfort of his wife and a small apartment, steeling himself for another eight hours of repetitious exertion under the eyes of a tyrant. He hated second shift, the dimming light that consumed the train yard after a diesel-stained sunset, and the need to be extra alert to the dangers of performing maintenance on switches at night. Daylight turned to darkness with the speed and mechanical precision of all the other switches in the yard.

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An Open Letter to Mark Twain

Dear Mr. Clemens:

 

I waited fifty-six years for your autobiography to be published, but the delay of one-hundred years you insisted upon after your demise went quickly, and were somewhat eventful.

 

I am halfway through the second volume of your post-mortem treatise, and I relish your words greatly. At times I feel you looking over my shoulder, appreciating the moments when you make me laugh or move me to tears. I only wish I could reach back and shake your hand.

 

A lot has happened since 1910. You missed two World Wars. Yes, the whole world. They were quite dramatic and conveniently numbered one and two. Tens of millions of souls perished but accomplished very little. In your time, King Leopold of Belgium slaughtered upwards of ten million in the Congo. It seems each generation lofts a murderous monster upon its shoulders lest we forget our history and fail to repeat it. As intrigued as you may have been by the German people in your time, in the 1940s they focused their industrious natures and energy on the extermination of the Jew. A strange little man with a partial mustache and carefully combed hair fell short of Leopold’s mark, but marched six million men, women and children into carefully engineered extermination machines by the boxcar. The country has borne the burden of cultural shame ever since.

 

You’ll be surprised to know that Democrats are now Republicans and Republicans are now Democrats. They traded hats, coats and desires without sacrificing any of the animosity and corruption each had mastered. Our country now has not one, but a thousand Jay Goulds, each of them sitting on financial empires as big as the budgets of moderate sized countries. We are within spitting distance of crowning our first trillionaire. Several billionaires are launching rockets to space, with their eye on Mars. That red planet seems within reach and is ripe for ruination. H.G. Wells would be upset about the loss of his copyright.

 

As you suspected, the United States of America is finally on the brink of becoming a monarchy. A swindler and asshat of unparalleled dimwitery somehow brought half the population under his spell, married a showgirl, slept with several sex workers and defrauded the general populace in a recent election. His insouciant density and tiny vocabulary appeal to a vast number of similarly deficient souls so obsessed with dethroning the imagined deep-state political establishment that they wear his clothing. (Recall the emperor’s clothes of course.) 

 

He lost, but the damned Electoral College mistakenly declared him king, thrusting the country into a bloodless civil war. Or so he thinks. He has been indicted for scores of felonies but plans to govern from behind bars. These are interesting times. If you can imagine it, this grifter encouraged the murder of his vice-president by an angry mob. That hapless fool lived and is now running against his former boss in the next election. People believe anything unless it is the truth.

 

You would have much to write about if you were still alive and would also be pleased to know that copyright now extends seventy years beyond an author’s life. Dictation no longer requires a human assistant. You would be mortified to know that the Paige Compositor became a reality, and then some, but not until the 1970s. An electric device called a computer captures your words and holds them in its memory until you are ready to print them on paper, also without human intervention or a printing press. These devices are as common as children’s toys.

 

Did I mention that men can fly? I’m sure you saw it coming, but imagine traveling abroad in hours, not weeks or months! You would struggle to even collect your thoughts before your trip’s end. “Innocents Abroad” would be obsolete before the ink dried.

 

Books are in jeopardy, and in particular one of your own. “Huckleberry Finn” now offends some people and has been banned in some libraries. Your use of the word, “nigger” has gone out of fashion. We now substitute, “n-word” in its place. I don’t know about you, but when someone employs that substitution, I hear the offensive original in my mind and wish they would just avoid it.

 

Women were given the vote ten years after your passing. Men have long sought to understand their better halves and finally succeeded, though we dare not let them know. To perfect this equation, we understand our need to be murderous cowboys with hearts of gold, assassins who melt at their touch into sensitive poetry-spewing codswallops. This life is not for everyone.

 

I hope that wherever you found to be your final destination you can read this. Big hugs to your entire family. We miss you and need you now more than ever.

😎

If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.