A Race of Raindrops

      And so, the race begins.

    The two of them run down without even a flicker of hesitation, without any thought or pause. There are others in this race—behind them, in front of them. Actually, the others are all around them, everywhere. The world is made of them today, but only the two of them matter in this race. They traverse the others that stand in the way, they hop over them; they zigzag around them sharply, erratically, cutting corners and spinning ankles like a football player. Sometimes, they even burst right through them, swallowing up any of the others that may dare to stand in their way. The left one breaks away and descends harshly by catching a streak of luck and coming across no obstacles in this particular stretch. Then, it hits something of a wall. The right racer witnesses the crash, senses an opportunity, and carves open a fresh bout of focus. It powers down steadily and weaves in and out of all the obstacles that wish it to fail. Unfazed is the one on the right, and it coolly swerves past the one on the left, which still remains stationary and unable to move and continue down the track. The right chugs on home and sings celebrations as it flies to the end, crashing into the silicone finish line in a suicidal explosion.

           Nora Ashmore watched the two raindrops race down the window out of sheer boredom. She resented her train journey into the city each day, so making up games for herself in her own mind was one of the ways in which she would encourage the passing of time. Sometimes she’ll bring a book, but it only goes so far and works so well as, since her divorce, Nora’s mind seldom stops and she has a damn hard time concentrating on other escapes, like a story. A glass of wine or a few seem to do the trick better than most, but she’ll have to wait for that. She’s also trying to spend less time on her phone these days, which means her time on the train exists in a moment of limbo, where just has to suffer and remain seated in a barren state of honest lethargy.

           Beyond the window, the train rolls through fits of mist and rain, blurring the sight of the world. Rainfall stains the window with streaks of loose water in chaotic patterns that make no sense, like the work of an angry painter. The gray landscape is overwhelming: the moment where the faraway distant hills meet the sky merge and become one. The morning enveloped in a colorless sphere. The rain out is heavy enough, but not too heavy, and is carried by an orchestra of wind gusts. If it wasn’t for the constant rattle, Nora would listen to the wind whistle through the crevasses of the train and the rain frazzle against the glass window. It would make her skin shake and shiver with blue fright.

           The train journey is the same each day and cuts through rural areas on its way into the city. Small pockets of impoverished neighborhoods sit in the shadows of every urban area and metropolis. The romance of the Big City that is shown through the media seems to neglect the reality of the run-down areas where despair lingers around every corner, sinking its claws into the youth and dragging them down unfavorable paths. The train passes through these areas, and passengers pretend not to see them, including Nora. The track itself is raised upon a small ridge, only a few feet high, and the long grass bumpers along both sides of the track, sprouting up by the steel, and reaches up beyond the spinning black wheels; they wave lazily when the train charges through. At the base of the track ridge, all the way through to the city, trash lingers. It has become part of the scenery. Tin cans and plastic bottles and worn, faded wrappings; there’s an occasional old shoe, and years-old surgical face masks. The train runs parallel with a wide river that snakes all around the city. The water of the river is soupy, rough, and brown, but it’s a staple of the wider area. Grand bridges connect roads across the river every few miles only add to its unromantic character, along with container ships that sail on by to and from the nearby ocean. A line of sycamores perch on the river banks, steering, like bowling alley guardrails, and the leaves and branches that shake loose in the coarse weather fall onto the grass, adding to the trashy mess that gathers down by the tracks.

           Nora has her head placed against the window and she looks out. Her ash-blond hair laxly by her shoulders. Through the rain-spotted window, she can see the dense group of skyscrapers in the distance reaching up into the clouds. Even on miserable days like today the clustered center of the city looks elegant, even from afar.

    The Big City promises wild dreams of riches and fame that, ultimately, seldom bloom, delivering only a bleak, fruitless existence of stale mediocrity.

    Nora turns on her headphones and looks down by the tracks that fly by, the humming of the train make her eyes heavy. She watches the water of the river flow with small white and brown waves when they fold and crash gently into the bank where the sycamores loom. There are parties of dense bushes and shrubs that congregate at the base of the trees by the sides of the river. It’s a wet mess of green, brown, and maroon nature, and the look of them makes Nora bask in her warmth. For once, she is thankful to be on the train.

    On the other side of the train lay parts of the outer city she had learned to ignore. Denial was easier. But then, something changed. A familiar pig-squeal aired out from the tracks—the train stopping. The locomotive doesn’t always stop here. Nora wishes it wouldn’t stop at all—she can’t help but feel uneasy in this area. Her soft, pretty hands turn clammy and her palms reluctantly welcome a layer of sticky sweat. Nora’s breathing cranked up a notch, which paired with a slim twist in her gut. A gentle feeling of doom descended. Nora turned off the music from her earphones.

    The train’s speed came along to a rolling stop, and the trash down on the grass went by at a slower clip. The train fell to a crawling pace when she noticed something odd, a flurry of black hung on the corner of her vision like a coat on a hanger.

    Feathers.

    Long, piercing feathers. And their carriers. A wake of vultures perched coldly in the sycamores; they hopped in smooth arcs on the ground and flexed their wide, dusky wings, paying hungry attention to something that lay in the bushes. Their waxy pink heads spiked up and down at their prize, picking and stabbing. They seemed to look directly at Nora through the window when their scaly faces ascended above the bushes while they nourished on dead flesh. A murder of crows flew in circles overhead like a checkpoint marker of death, signaling to scavenging reapers that dinner is served.

    At first Nora assumed roadkill. A deer that leapt the tracks at precisely the wrong time and caught a mouthful of steel train. No, there’s not many deer in areas areas like this, and not many wooded areas, either. A wild rabbit, possibly? Still no. There are too many birds for a rabbit, or any other verminous mammal. She couldn’t see the animal due to its position in the bushes—it seemed unlikely that an animal falls down naturally here by the riverbank too. The train carried on rolling ever slower, and then she saw it, a wash of something milky sticking out.

    A hand.

    White, small, dirty.

    Lifeless, with pretty pink nails on curled fingers. Peering solely on the grass out of one of the bushes. The arm it’s attached to and the rest of the body unseen, hidden by the greenery.

    Nora felt cutting bile scatter in her body like confetti, an icy sickness overtaking her nervous system, pushing her pupils open to resemble black buttons. She daren’t look away even if it was her greatest desire—a spoiled calamity nailed her to her seat. The train kept rolling along gently, like nothing was wrong. Her face matching the color of her hair now. A stiff hand, undoubtedly. She wasn’t imagining things, she was sure. Hungry vultures caring none.

    Nora was unsure if the next thing she saw was real though, because as the train rolled on by, her gaze tore away from the horror of a cold human hand on the ground and further along the river bank, stood by the bushes under the sycamores, watching, was a silhouette. A smudge of a shadow in the trees, a shapeless figure that blurred through the window. Then it moved.

    The figure then came to, and the imaged pieces fell right into place and the eyes she found were already staring at her. A tall, slender man in a long black trench coat. His face was mostly hidden by shadows, and by the time Nora’s eyes had found his worn, brown shoes, climbed their way up gray and black cargo pants, molested his torso and black coat and met his sharked face, the dirty yellow eyes were already upon hers. They were mean, mean eyes. Even through the rain-whipped window, the sight of this villain seemed so clear, and poor Nora could see so vividly the scarring on his wrinkled face. The narrow, vertical pupils baked into the canvas of his sinful eyes, the look of midnight prison lights. They pierced through everything, penetrating poor Nora’s soul like a bullet. He was probably six or seven yards from the body, and until the train pulled up, he must have been simply watching the bird’s feast. Nora’s pink lips trembled as she tried to scream, but couldn’t. The man read her mind. As their eyes met through the window, the train crawled on by and, with him almost out of sight, he gave a wide grin—too wide, and placed his pointed index finger upon his lips.

    “Shhh.”

    Then he was gone and out of sight, the train passed on. She looked at the passing bushes and the trash on the ground. The trees and the roaring water of the river and the birds and the wicked wind and the raucous rain moving yet staying the same like a zoetrope. She pulled out her phone. Zero signal.

    The next few seconds felt like hours lost in a maze. The train coach was empty—Nora always electing to sit in the rear coaches for this very reason. Now, she longed for company to help catch her sanity. She stood from her seat, needing help, to alert someone. There’s a dead body! And the lingering smell of musky leather came clear at the forefront of her senses, the smell of old train carriages, with the walls and windows and roof closing in. Her vision spun like plates, and either the rain outside fell harder or her hearing isolated in her brain and the sounds became ultra clear. Nora was nauseated with disbelief. They don’t mention bodies being snacked on by black birds of prey in the papers.

    In a flash, Nora crashed back in her seat. She searched her flailing mind for any slither of explanation to hang her discovery upon. She wished it to be another cruel trick of the rain and shadows, but, no. Too real. The way he looked right at her and shushed coldly was nightmarish. His smile was a fiend, too many teeth, shallow yet sharp. They eye of a cobra glowing through mist. The screams of the metal wheels unhasting.

    The pretty pink nails... something about their curled nature and the stiffness in the rain screams violence. Who knows what fury they witnessed.

           The train eventually fell to a stop. It must have taken half a mile of slowing down to reach stillness. More than often the journey into the city would plow right on through this area with stops at these locations being scarce, usually for good reason. Looking across the carriage and out of the other window, Nora see’s old houses caged with rusted chain-linked fences. Some of the houses have small, wooden porches. The centipede grass of the brief gardens are overwhelmed by beige, green and brown. Old children’s toys and playhouses stand lonely in the rain, long since forgotten, neglected and replaced by less favorable behaviors. Pink tricycles hugged by mold and moss; Nora wonders if the girls with pink nails rode a bike or played in these gardens. A young girl from this area would be an easy target, and a man from a broken neighborhood would be an easy suspect. The track ahead goes through a narrow underpass riddled with overlapping graffiti which keeps unbothered by rain. Gang signs and phrases best left unsaid, names and insults. Histories of hooded characters in an upbringing of despair. The barks of dogs with visible ribs almost bursting from their coats echo through the air.

           Nora Ashmore grew up comfortable, relatively speaking, with an imperfect yet unbroken family. She always had birthdays to celebrate and always had gifts to open on Christmas morning. Her mother warned her from these types of areas, because this is where bad people linger.

    “Don’t talk to strangers!” is what she always said—she said it so much it was like a tattoo imprinted in Nora’s head. Nora was raised to look down on communities with less and to swerve clear, she wasn’t to play with other girls and certainly wasn’t to speak to boys from here, because it’s dangerous and dirty and illiterate. But now, as she sits on the train, on her way into the Big City to her mind-numbing data entry job, the same as every other day, conned by its romance, in her nice woolen cream-colored coat and a skirt slightly too small which screams recently divorced, she feels compassion. She felt like she knew the girl by the riverbank. Chunks of her flesh and muscles sat at the daggered ends of the vulture’s mandible and maxilla, she herself swallowed up by sickly sorrow. This is the reality of what exists on the skating edge of torn communities where city resources do not reach. She looks out again and see’s the city skyline—it looks like a giant living creature—and she feels deep irony with a hypocritical taste swirling around her mouth.

           A mechanical wheezing sound knocks Nora out of her daydream. A dead body. A killer with yellow eyes and a lust for blood—a killer that saw her.

    Yes, that happened.

    Nora is still alone in the cab, and still needs to tell someone what she saw. There’s no signal on her phone still, and it doesn’t look to pick up just yet as the train winds up heavily and begins rolling out through tunnels and miserable underpasses. The rain continues to spit to the ground, giving the grass a dewy glimmer alongside the sweeping bronze river. There’s been no train conductors pass through this cab while Nora has been sat here, and today is the sole day she wishes that wasn’t the case. Her biggest irritation is people talking to her, but today it is a burning desire. Maybe someone else in one of the other cars saw the man—the train had slowed down considerably when she spotted him, too. And what happened after the train passed? Is he still there?

    A sliding noise behind her interrupts Nora’s thoughts again. It’s the sound of the door that connects each compartment, and she breathes a brisk sigh of relief. Her phone is pulled out again: no signal still. Footsteps approach. Slow, eerily heavy footsteps. Odd, but the coach shakes slightly when it’s in motion, hence the slower steps. A conductor or another passenger… either are welcome. Sounds of heavy breaths pump her heart and Nora feels a heavy discomfort—a quality of airy pain. She goes to flick her head over her shoulder to check when, all at once, a fresh layer of horror blankets her. Disbelief burrowing beyond bedrock. A tall, heavy boned man, with a long black trench coat walks around into her line of sight. The smell is foul. It’s an industrial rot that sticks to the roof of her fear-dried mouth, and Nora Ashmore’s breath catches in the trapdoor of the throat in her final times. The man has a wicked presence, and sits opposite her slowly in the booth, like one would with an old friend.

    Suddenly, his lemony eye’s contract and glare in the gray light and his tight, clean-shaven jaw tenses. He raised a gloved hand, isolated a finger and pressed it to his mouth, and sharp smile erupted and bladed, layered teeth show.

           “Shhh.”