Читать книгу The Grave on the Wall - Brandon Shimoda - Страница 11

THE NIGHT OF THE DAY MY GRANDFATHER DIED

The night of the day my grandfather died, I went for a walk in the woods. I was in my freshman year of college, upstate New York. Train tracks ran through the woods to Canada. A ditch ran alongside the tracks. I was walking in the ditch when a train appeared, moving very slowly. It sounded like it was going to grind to a halt or fall apart. It was a freight train, but I saw faces, heard breathing. The walls of the train were constellated with thousands of eyes and as many haloes of breath, respiring, through horizontal slits, an emerald light.

The train was interminable. It took the moon traversing night for it to pass. After it passed, small lights flickered on the tracks. Reflections of the eyes or sparks off the wheels. Then people appeared, a procession, carrying lights, swinging them like censers. I could see their faces in half-illuminated fragments. What I could see was young. I was young too but felt old and unreal. They did not seem to see me in the ditch. They did not lift their eyes from the tracks.

After they passed, the woods grew lighter, and I became aware of where I was standing. The trees arching over the tracks, the stream in the ditch, the light of dawn in the stream. In the wake of the train and the procession, the woods seemed static, silent and still. The grinding of the train gave way to the sound of insects turning down.

The events of that evening into morning became my first image of my grandfather’s afterlife. It was the first thing, obscure and overflowing, onto which I projected what I did not yet know was grieving.