They're putting more coaches on the train

 

How can you lie there sleeping peacefully when beneath you lie the perfect souls you tore from the hearts of those who loved them?

The tears did not stop when the bodies stopped breathing.

They kept moving outward in silent waves.

Into kitchens where untouched cups of tea turned cold.

Into hallways where mothers stood listening for footsteps that would never return.

Into bedrooms where fathers sat at the edge of beds at three in the morning, unable to understand how the world had continued spinning at all.

Disbelief.

Confusion.

Horror.

The endless, echoing why.

Do you even know the reason yourself?

Or did it become instinct long ago, passed down like an heirloom soaked in oil and grave dirt, handed from father to son beneath the floorboards of that rotting house where every wall remembers your name?

Give us the reason.

How do you rest your head upon a soft pillow knowing what your hands are capable of?

How do your eyelids lower so easily while others remain awake for decades, staring into darkness that no longer feels empty?

You entered places of refuge.

Warm homes.

Safe rooms.

Lives wrapped in ordinary peace.

And then you carried the storm inside.

You know what you did.

I know.

We know.

The walls know.

Sometimes, late at night, I imagine the sound first. Not the sirens. Not the shouting. The footsteps. Heavy footsteps climbing the staircase two at a time while the house itself seems to hold its breath. The sudden realization that the lock on the front door was never protection at all, merely delay.

When will the footsteps finally come running up your stairs?

Soon, I hope.

Monster.

You are a monster.

Like your father before you.

And somewhere far from that poisoned bloodline, Tiny Fair whispered forgiveness into the dark as though it were medicine. But forgiveness is not hers to give away like bread to starving birds. Some things crawl too deep beneath the earth to be lifted clean by mercy alone.

People drift now like untethered balloons in a dead sky. Floating through the ether. Suspended between truth and madness. Families orbiting grief with nowhere safe to land. The nightmare became architecture; entire lives built around absence.

But it can end.

The control can end.

The silence can end.

The nightmare can finally choke on its own shadow.

“Oh Frenchy,” she said quietly, her voice almost swallowed by the twilight, “you are so right. I will begin the long journey soon.”

And the air changed when she said it.

The room itself seemed to lean closer.

“But first,” she whispered, “we have to go where there is no more daylight. No darkness either. Only twilight.”

That terrible in-between place.

Neither heaven nor earth.

Neither memory nor forgetting.

The hour where all truths crawl out onto the road.

Then she smiled faintly toward the dying horizon.

“Then it’s back to the Farm.”

Back to the Farm.