The Purple Ticket

I look out at a vast blue ocean from the window of my train. The water rolls and tumbles over itself in smooth, gentle pillows. It does not break into white peaks or crash angrily along the rocky shoreline as I expect it to. Instead, it remains still as I travel alongside it, as if waiting for me to react first. It wins. I cannot help but give it attention. I feel strange not doing so, for though the ocean is vast, it is fleeting to my eyes. 

I worry it will be far behind me if I blink. And I cannot put more behind me. 

A sheet of black and gray streaks across the window. The blue world disappears and I am alone again with my thoughts. I hold my breath and don’t release until the tunnel evaporates and the ocean returns to greet me. 

But it is not so friendly this time. It challenges me to hold its gaze, and I fight exhaustion to meet its demands. I wonder if it knows where I am going, or if it longs for me to stay. I wonder if that is why its white fingertips now rise over the blue, twirling farewell, before slinking back into the abyss. 

I force myself to turn to the other window across the aisle. There’s only swaying trees and yellow stalks of grass. They wave just as the ocean did, though I don’t feel bad looking away. There will always be dead grass and there will always be weeds.

I know absolutely nothing, not even my name, but I am somehow sure of that. 

The train goes dark as it slides through a pitless tunnel and my loneliness becomes all the less strange. Maybe this gloom is why there is no one else sitting within the rows and rows of seats, and why the conductor questioned my decision to board. But the crumpled, purple ticket the wind had blown into my hands that morning looked too odd to throw away. Anne Kresher. It is a simple, kind, name, probably for a simple, kind girl. Why would her name be printed on the ticket? What would she be doing with a token to this train? A train where the velvet seats are itchy and coarse, where the windows ridges are grimey and gray? Surely she does not belong on this vessel. Surely, I am sparing her from the boundless silence. 

It is a strange feeling, to not know where I am going. I do not have a clue where the train will pause, nor did I think to ask. Though I have not seen the conductor since I left the station. his voice still rings in my ears: Are you sure? There is no train back. 

I didn’t hesitate to hand him the ticket. 

The conductor only offered me a grave nod. At the time, I thought he was judging my haste. But now, I suspect he was sad. It must be lonely controlling a train that so few board.

I squint as the tunnel walls shift to a blocky, dry plain. Sunlight claws at me through the glass panes of the windows, glaring high above from the clear blue of a summer sky. The world is a flat wonder and I envision the ocean pooling from the cracks and crevices, drowning all that is in sight. 

It is then that I realize the train begins to slow. 

The plain unravels itself into a still landscape painting. The silence is filled with angry gears, cracking and pulling on the metal tracks. I brace myself for the stop, and when the train finally does, I contemplate rising. There is something uncomfortably familiar about the way the sun tattoos the yellow earth. It draws me near, pulling on a distant part of my memories that I cannot understand. 

There is no station here, only one house. Odd. It is a flat and square little thing, decorated with a clean, white door. A tall young man opens it from the inside, turns around to close it shut, and turns once more to face the train. He is just like the land: uncomfortably familiar. 

He wears a pink button up, rolled up at the sleeves, which reveal his tanned forearms. Swept back hair shows his warm, brown eyes. He stares at me through the train window, but I know he cannot see me. The train is black and blue, the windows are tinted dark. 

I wave anyway. To my surprise, he waves back. 

“Odd,” I murmur. 

The man walks slowly to the train, slinging his hands into his pockets as if he has all the time in the world. He disappears from my sight, but not before I see him pull out a purple ticket. 

A second later, the sounds of the train doors sliding apart reach my ears. Footsteps clatter along the metal floors, and the young man is standing in the middle of the aisle. 

I am a blank slate. What does one say when they do not own their name? I straighten, and imagine what Anne Kresher might do in such a situation, though the exercise is not helpful. Anne Kresher probably tends to her grandmother, eats minestrone soup on Sundays, and never forgets to do her laundry. She probably does not steal and lie.

The man walks with the same slowness towards me, and approaches the empty seat to my right. He asks, “Is this seat taken?”

I pan my gaze around the empty train. “All yours.” 

He smiles and slides down next to me. His shoulder brushes mine, the fabric of his pink shirt rustling the rough corduroy of my worn jacket. 

“Norman Reid,” he says, staring straight ahead. 

I turn and study the planes of the stranger’s face. He cannot be older than twenty. His skin is bronzed and golden, his nose freckled with small tan dots. “Anne Kresher.” 

“Nice to see you again, Anne Kresher.”

“Nice to meet—what did you say?”

“Nice to see you again, Anne Kresher.” Norman Reid’s smile widens and he faces me. “I’ve been waiting for you to board.”

I cannot help but frown. “We have never met before. I believe you are mistaken.”

Norman Reid studies me carefully and I wait for him to confirm his slipup. He only holds out his right hand. “Nice to see you again, Anne Kresher.” 

I shake it, still frowning. “Nice to meet you, Norman Reid.” Perhaps the conductor had told the young man the name on my ticket after he saw me wave from the window. I gesture to the yellow blocks of earth. “Do you live here?”

“Yes. I am the only house for miles, but yours is the first one on the edge of the nearest town.” 

Yours? “Where are we?”

“The city of Irone.”

“Irone,” I sound out, rubbing the familiar letters together on my tongue. “And why are you boarding this train, Norman Reid?”

Norman Reid’s eyes flicker. He circles his head up to the ceiling of the train, then back down to me. “I have been waiting for you to board.” 

There’s a depth in his voice that makes me pause. It is as if he has been holding back the words for quite some time, and now that they have landed in my ears he can finally breathe. But I am not the intended recipient. The words do not land gracefully. 

The train doors shut. The yellow landscape morphs back into streaks as the train continues on its way. Forward, just as it did before. 

“Where is this train going?” I ask, hoping to change the subject. 

“Where is it not going?” he says back. 

“That’s hardly an answer.”

Norman Reid shrugs and stares past me to look out the window. “Did you read your ticket, Anne?”

I think back to the moment I first discovered the purple paper. I was walking along the sidewalk, right under Brick’s Bridge, when a gust of wind swept through my bones. I had shut my eyes, thinking it might carry me away, only to feel a tickle crawl across my hands. A venomous spider, I had hoped. But no—a crumpled paper. A crumpled ticket. Only the name Anne Kresher and the address 816 W Belgrade Ave were printed on it.

Everything else before that moment is a blur. A nebulous cloud of memory lurks in the back of my mind, but it is too far to reach. There was Brick’s Bridge, and then there was the ticket. And now I am here.

“816 Belgrade Ave,” I recite. “Is that where you live?”

Norman laughs as if I have said something funny. His eyes crease into half-moons and I memorize the image because of how strange it appears against the backdrop of the somber train. “That is where you live, Anne.” 

How long can I hide I’m nothing more than a petty identity thief? “Where I live?” 

“Where you live.”

“You have to stop that,” I say. “You know. Repeating what I say and only changing one word. It doesn’t really add any meaning.”

Norman laughs again. “You have not changed one bit. Though your hair is shorter. Did you mean to cut it? Or did Sally make you do it?” 

Sally?  “I cut my hair because I wanted to cut it. No one made me do it.”

“Sure,” Norman jests. “You would never cut her hair without a reason, though. So what was it?” 

“What was what?”

“What was the reason?”

I touch the ends of my short black hair instinctively. It had only been a few months since I had taken kitchen shears and sliced a whole six inches off the end, but the locks seemed to be frozen in time. They were still blunt. They were still weeds. “There was no reason.”

“I can tell when you are lying, too, Anne.” Norman says. “Your ears turn pink and your nose wiggles from side to side. You’ve been doing it since we were kids. Since the very first day I met you out by Mrs. Hill’s playground. Do you remember what happened?”

“My memory is failing me,” I say truthfully. 

“I threw the ball over the fence and it hit someone’s car. Mrs. Hill came over to yell at me, but you stepped in front and said it was your fault. Your ears were bright red, Anne.” 

“And my nose was wiggling?”

“Just a bit. I had to see you lie a bit more to nail that one down.”

I shut one eye and try to picture this Anne Kresher doing as Norman Reid described. She seems as I assumed, then: kind. “And we have been…good friends since that day?”

Norman nods. “You were the only one who played with me during recesses. We used to climb across the monkey bars and pretend we were superheros. You would always help me across because I was too short to reach the bars back then.”

Very kind. I begin to feel a dull ache in my chest at the thought of sweet Anne Kresher searching aimlessly for her ticket. We must look similar, this girl and I. That, or Norman Reid cannot tell right from wrong. “Why were you waiting for her—for me—to board?”

The train comes to a shuddering stop. I grip my seat at the sudden motion. 

Norman points to the window. I look to the outside that I have been ignoring for the last several minutes and see the same yellow earth. But this time, it is decorated by many little flat-ceiling houses, similar to Norman’s. Some have yards of green grass. Others are attached to dark gates. A paved road runs through the middle of the houses. Gleaming cars of bright red and blue line the sides of the street, basking under a leaden sun.

There is still no station.

Norman rises from his seat and jerks his chin towards the window. “Come on. We’re here, Anne Kresher.” 

He strolls down the aisle faster than I can blink. Where was this urgency before? 

Hurry, you. 

Because I assume Anne Kresher would rise, I leave my seat, say goodbye to the scratchy velvet, and follow Norman Reid out of the train.