The Midnight Train

I met my first love on the Midnight Train. I had been staring out the train window, watching the streaks of rain gleam as they hit the pane and the flash of shadows and trees and life beyond that I couldn’t quite see in the darkness, when I saw his reflection in the glass.

Riding had been a last resort. My mother had insisted I marry the pig farmer twice my age who’d asked for my hand in exchange for a prize winning sow. Surely I was worth two? Instead of donning bridal white, I’d packed my meager possessions and waited at the train station for the Midnight Train. At seventeen, I was on the cusp of childhood where the stories of the fae who lived in the hills and stone rings yonder still held sway in my heart, so I believed the tale of the Midnight Train. Some claimed to have seen it while a scant few claimed to have ridden it. The dark train that only appeared at midnight. It knew you better than yourself, taking you from where you needed to leave and brought you where you needed to be. 

As midnight drew closer in the darkening gloom, I had begun to fear that I was too old for magic and the pig farmer was to have a bride after all. I strained my ears, but there was no clacking or whistling of a train on the tracks. The station was painfully empty. Cold rain fell around me and the light of the gas lamps gave only the illusion of warmth. Then, in the span of a blink, it was there. Black as the sky without stars and sleeker than any train I’d seen before, it pulled soundlessly into the station. When the door opened, I didn’t hesitate.

It wasn’t like I sold my soul to ride the train, as the people in my village claimed. No, it had cost a memory from childhood. It preferred a happy one though a miserable one would do. Emotion was emotion, after all. I knew not which I had given but it could have feasted off the latter.

He had taken the train from a city where he’d scraped by as a thief. He claimed he wanted to change his ways and make an honest living. I didn’t fully believe it with the way he made my few coins disappear from my pocket and reappear behind a lock of my hair. Or maybe it was because he stole something that night from me as we told our tales of the past and dreamed of the adventures of our futures. Quickly and with a mischievous grin, that thief stole my heart.

“Avia,” I had answered when he asked me my name. It sounded more interesting than my own, but also we had always been warned not to give our names to strangers. They might be fae in disguise. 

“A beautiful name for a beautiful girl,” he’d whispered and grabbed my hand as we raced down the plush carpeted halls past sleeping passengers and empty rooms til we were out of breath and gasping with laughter. Excitement or newness or perhaps just a bit of fear edged that night in gold in my memory. I know now that I should never have let go of his hand.

But that was the curse of the Midnight Train. Though we stepped off the train just seconds apart, my feet landed on a platform in London and he… well, he landed somewhere else. 

I knew you couldn’t board the Midnight Train at dawn but I tried anyway. The door was closed, though I hadn’t heard it shut behind me and I pounded a fist on it. As if my attempts were no more than whispers in the wind, the train began to move back out as soundlessly as it had arrived hours before. The people milling around in tweed suits and long skirts seemed not to notice its departure. They looked for their own trains or glanced at their watches but I stared at the Midnight Train as it inched away. I blinked against the rising light of dawn and it was gone by the time my eyes opened.

The city had not seen the same rain I had the night before in my village but was dry and dirty and beautiful. Perhaps that was why I didn’t reboard the Midnight Train that night. I was hundreds of miles away from my old life and I fell in love with the city as I wandered that morning. 

If the city was my second love, then the newspaper was my third. But it was my fourth who truly made me stay. I met him in the office as I applied to sell papers on the corners, the humble start of my career as a journalist. He had smiled at me that day though I hadn’t noticed and wouldn’t for many months. I slipped slowly in love with him, giving him my heart over cups of tea and long walks through my beloved city. 

But I thought of the man who had stolen my heart that night on the Midnight Train whenever it rained. 

Perhaps that was why I was staring out the window now. The rain was slipping down the window pane and I thought of him. My fourth love was gone now nearly a decade and my son was living a full life with a wife and child a continent away. He never fully believed my tale of the Midnight Train so he now thought I was simply traveling in my retirement. Each night, I boarded the Midnight Train, and at dawn it left me somewhere new. Sometimes it took me a day or two to search out the right station or for the train to appear again at midnight but I would always find my way back to it. 

I saw quaint villages and bustling metropolises, horrific slums and dusty ghost towns, scorching deserts and frozen tundras. I traveled until I only had the vaguest notion that I must have had a mother once. Everyone does, surely, but I couldn’t remember her name or face or smell. The hole where the memories I had paid with didn't feel painful, but mostly I hoped that it wouldn’t one day take him.

Still, I rode the Midnight Train. The night flew by out my window and I watched my fellow passengers, but especially the young girls who rode the train for the first time with relief written on their faces. I’d smile and say hello. Listen to their stories on occasion. Sometimes, I’d watch as they found their own first loves seated beside them or across aisles. I’d leave the train steps behind them and wonder where they landed. What they did, I didn’t know for I never saw them again. They didn’t reboard but I did. Night after night, I rode the Midnight Train and waited.

I rode until I heard what I had been searching for. 

“Avia?” 

That was my last ride on the Midnight Train.