Old Caboose

More than anything, I remember the weight of his rope tied to my rafters. The tight impossibility of the knot.

He crawled often inside my belly. Always alone except the once.

I knew nothing and everything about him. He would talk to me, leaning against my cracked wooden walls. He’d ask me what it was like being what I am, and I couldn’t answer because of what I am, but I think that was fine by him.

Now and then, I yearn for a mouth and tongue. For the slow curves of speech.

They say I’m going to be uprooted now. That they’re going to tear me down. They say they’re going to rip out the rails and build a path for bicycles.

Pardon my cynicism, but in my steel-plated wheels, I believe this town will bleed the taxpayers dry just to pay for my removal. And the rails will stay shot into the flat of the horizon, the Midwest’s best scar.

Or maybe its veins.

I’ve been condemned to die by the overgrown youth who were raised in my shadow, smoking weed that drifted through my hinge-hung doors. And they tried to pry me open.

But I held them shut to all but one boy. And maybe that’s why the others began to hate me. Or maybe they would have come inside and failed to kneel in my cobwebbed sanctuary, failed to admire my darkened corners the way he always did.

He gave back all he knew, told me about his mom and dad and the way they never seemed to fight. Told me about his sister and the boys who ran her ragged. Told me about the one girl he wanted to bring here, and I guess by not speaking, I gave my consent.

And the time he brought her inside, it rained all night. I held out the water as best I could, but I’m not what I used to be. They watched each other undress in the sporadic lightning, buried their moans beneath the thunder's best quilt.

Then, he didn’t visit for a while. I let more rust grow in my iron bones.

What happens to me when they scrap my red-flaked frame? I like the idea of recycling. Or reincarnation. That I could be a hundred thousand copper pennies. Or a skyscraper chatting with birds.

He told me once he was afraid of heaven. That it might just be a place where we all sit around singing hymns and collecting social security. That it might be a place without rust. He said the last as he stroked my broken rafter and slipped the rope around it.

This town has no concept of reconstruction. Of resurrection. I’ve known my whole life only East and West, but maybe that is enough. Maybe multiplicity of dimension serves only to confuse.

They’ve decided to burn me down tomorrow night. Decided that will be the quickest. The least painful for everyone. They say they need me to stop haunting them.

There will be an emptiness in my wake, larger than any presence I ever had.

Now, I am no more than a misbegotten dream.

In death, I will be a blaze, seared to the eyes of any who see me go.