It was cold in the city.
Traffic of blunt yellows and reddened bitumen lay halted in stuttering cacophony as another arc of muddy sunlight glowered above the smog laden sky of Polis.
Dissatisfied pigeons, all mottled and grey, roosted upon their chilly ledges and dumbly pecked at a reflection of themselves, rapping staccato upon the glass and disturbing the dwellers within; another inconvenience, another straw upon the nest, a nest upon a building, a building upon the long-flattened grasslands laying buried below.
Wind, sharply drawn from the warmth of the sewer, rolls languid across the scrabbled asphalt and carries a tannin-like dust into the path of the late-hour commute. A tumult of leaflitter–and common litter alike—sweeps along the street in swirling colour; its browns and greys, its discarded advertisements, both wilted of use and left to moulder in the gutter.
With lamp lit weary and low, the similar coils itself away from the discomfort of this sudden wind. Thread-bald and unable ward against the cold, these fragments reach for naught in moments so lonely, no candle to set in their heart, false light captured in bottle and fear in the sounds of nearby footfall.
Polis sleeps. Winter exhales.
–
‘It appears that the waiting room has been locked.’
A frail voice stooped over the sleeping form of Peter Letti, rousing him from absent dreams and drawing away the blank curtain that had encompassed him.
Winter’s breath was visible in the draft of settling nightfall and a low scattering of frost dusted itself across a lonely train platform.
Lost, but yet still lulled by the dance of his overfilled night, Peter struggled to take in the features of the man before him, only finding the outline of fog and the greys of a wrinkled line adorning his visitor.
Unable to focus his sight, Peter instead searched his surroundings and gazed up and down the grimly silent platform.
A train station. Clean bricks and age-worn tiles neatly lain aside a track of iron and stone made sloeblack dull by years of use.
Snow, so gentle that the warmth of the departing day held it aloft, danced in the lone lamp light illuminating the platform harsh and white. Obliquely this lamp drew a line of shadow from light into darkness and left only the twinkling Polis outside its glow.
Form began to return as meaning and Peter noticed a smaller light glowing from behind a window of glass built into the platform wall. The station waiting room, an empty space shadowed by a single lantern, its wick turned low, and the remainder of the room hidden by its soft light. The room seemed to Peter as a quiet place, a place of long needed respite, warmth against the cold. Far at the back of his recollection, Peter remembered the warmth of his own home. Orange shapes and burbling voices, movement, dancing, a feeling that he knew more closely than the impassive stone of this platform.
‘Are you awake?’
The voice again enquired no less frail than before. It was a weak voice boarded by the lines of fragile age and varnished from a lifetime of talk. Peter felt a pressure and could see that the voice had rested a hand upon his forearm. Not a push, nor kick to his side. A gentle touch.
‘A miserable night to be alone,’ the voice whispered, ‘come, we’ll share each other’s warmth and wait for the next train.’
Peter stirred into firm conscious and the platform began to feel uneven. There was a static to the world, a shifting from what had once been datum.
Placing a hand to his head, Peter only noticed now the peppered frost that was settling upon his clothes. His arm, once held at his side, felt numb and pain bloomed from his fingertips. How desperately he wanted to return to the uniform black of unconscious.
‘Awake at this lonely hour.’ he mumbled to his disturbance and then searched at his side for something long lost.
‘I’m no company.’
‘And yet, you find yourself within it all the same. No need for talking, let us just sit and enjoy what respite we can. Snow is a poor blanket and I’m sure that you’ll find no comfort beneath it. Come now, up you stand.’
Lifting Peter upward with support from his cane, the old man coughed deeply from the effort and patted at his chest, an old pain stirring at his side.
‘This cold,’ he spoke weakly, ‘takes more than it gives us. More and more people fall to the hardness of this city.’
‘Oh?’ Peter asked with some equilibrium. He was standing now, vacantly helping a frail old man walk to a bench in blinding glow. What time was it?
‘Before me there was less concrete, less people. There was shelter, no…locked doors.’
Gesturing to the empty waiting room, the man finally had settled his breathing and drew inward for a moment.
‘I sometimes wonder if we were happier back then, before I happened along.’
Peter looked at the man with tallow-sight. He wore a winter’s beard, white and uncombed, with mouse-meek hair and a withdrawn posture. His clothes were neat, sensibly retailored as if they had changed along with him as he aged and still carried the hints of an older time before.
There was a wholeness to the man that Peter felt he knew and, in a way, belonged to. It was the feeling of presence, of home.
‘There’s many more that I’d wish to sit beside us,’ The man said, tapping his walking stick upon the ground and dropping onto the bench with relief, ‘It can be such a lonely place on a winter’s night. Electric light and radiators, so many voices. I remember before the trains were built, even the roads, I remember being so small then, neighbours, friends, just houses either side, the unblinking sky above. Have you met your neighbours?’
Peter had fallen beside the old man and was fretfully dozing, his short breaths appearing and fading like rime in the frozen air.
The old man looked across the platform and into the city beyond. He watched the patient streets, and he remembered the old bones beneath. Everything within Polis had grown so quickly but the old man still felt the same. The people, his people, were in essence the very same as the first few who had settled by the crooked river. He felt their heartbeat, the pulse of his own growth alongside them.
Looking at the station clock and hearing the slow rumble of the approaching train, the old man patted Peter on his knee and once again roused him from slumber.
‘The train’s arrived, my friend. I think that we should find your way home.’
J. McCray
2023
Sunday Short Stories 