Toy Battery Train Poem by Cristina M. Moldoveanu

I was sleeping for ¾ days, because of boredom, and I walked up on an empty boarding platform with its pavement stones blackened. The grass sprouted out victorious among cracks, black as coal. The wind managed to stir up the dry poplars from their dark silence. It was like the meowing of an abandoned black kitten, precociously aware of its color handicap in a hostile world, a special meowing, hollow and squeaky, pathetic and funny altogether, almost begging for a drop of curdled milk, because fresh milk is available only for brown striped kittens with fluffy coats.

I began to go round the station aimlessly, feeling through my thin shoe soles that the train approached. I walked in a kind of led armor, tighter and tighter, looking with my half opened eyes towards the moon's eyelid engulfing the clouds. The train was really coming closer popping from sleeper to sleeper, as if running right or left from its tracks, anyway completely discontent of its compulsory straight road. Its large windows had a phosphorescent shine, therefore resembling from afar with some Christmas decorations in a city with a sky dark as pitch and smoky everywhere.

I wasn't certain if I dreamed or if I was awake when the train got in my sight. Although I trembled because of cold and fear, I don't think I would have climbed up. At every window there was a dead body, with its face almost black, and beside every corpse there was a doll all dressed in white: a bride doll with clean and frothy laces and veils floating in the wind. The lights in every compartment were colored differently, crescendo: white, yellow, orange, red, crimson, violet, blue. At the last window it was dark, but, leaning over the sill, I could see the head of a child, safe and sound, laughing wholeheartedly.

Then I closed my eyes and started to cry. I was no more afraid but I knew that I wasn't asleep any longer.