Epilogue

Spreading sunrise’s pinkish, orange, and red haloing glow, colors spread across the sky announcing the new painted across the clouds. Another beautiful morning. The grating, metallic shriek heralds the arrival of the overpopulated locomotive at the station. Amai’s mouth gapes once more as an indicative response to his early morning weariness. The large sliding doors reluctantly ease open to take on more into the densely crowded moving machine’s amalgam of frail elderly awoken earliest at dawn for ideal seats, their own self-entitled thrones for a life long lived; posh businessmen in high-class three-piece suits and expensive designer brand shoes; and the lowest on the morning train hierarchy- drowsy, noisy, gossipy high school teens wearing faces as expressionless as corpses burdened en route for their prisons of chairs and desks.

The train takes a plunge, and accelerates on its bound course of rusting steel. It rocks back and forth with its relentless whining and groaning as if it t