#tht one she literally jst. calls a man tht it doesnt go beyond tht at all or anything

[bradfordarchive]

true or false | self para

The screech of a train can swallow a scream, if you time it right.

Not just a feeble one, either. Full bodied. The kind that curls your toes, has you imagining them sprouting talons, and rooting in the dirt to keep you from keeling.

Sometimes, when Bradley screamed like that, she imagined her hair floating around her, live in static -- sparking, to the touch. She imagined somebody trying to reach their hand out, and frying a finger no sooner had they poked a strand. Skin pruning, and cooking, charring to the point that you could taste the smell in the back of your throat. A slither of human steak, grisly between your molars. Hannibal Lecter’s favourite appetiser.

The first time Bradley rode all the way to the end of a subway line, she was thirteen. Trains never stopped running, which irritated Bradley. Didn’t they ever get fucking sick of it? Of going in circles? Didn’t they ever just want to snap and derail, even if it meant taking everyone on board with them? Especially then?

As the carriage rattled, index poking a mulch of gum into the shape of a human brain, Bradley thought about the fact it had probably belonged to somebody making an evening commute from work. Somebody that cut their sandwiches into triangles, and packed them up in Tupperware. Somebody committed to a meal plan, and game nights on Thursdays, and parting their hair down the side with a fine toothed comb.

By the time she set foot onto the platform, she’d squished it into an unrecognisable splodge beneath her thumb. Pictured it stringing away red, and elastic, a disgusting sop of organ she could stretch out and play hopscotch with.

She’d hadn’t been able to think about anything that didn’t end in blood, since she realised her mother’s draws were empty and her shoes were gone. 

“Kid?”

Kid.

Bradley kept kicking her boots out. Turning a lighter in hand, with eyes lined dark like a raccoon. Kohl pencil, ringed six times and intentionally left messy. She wanted to be ugly. She wanted to look like a dark alley where you can only make out teeth.

“You can’t sit there, kid.”

‘Lyss is gone, kid. She didn’t want us, any more. You weren’t enough to make her stay.

“Kid, you fuckin’ deaf?” Shaking his hands from his pockets across the platform, a beanie clad stranger straightened. “Said you can’t sit there. Cut it with the smokes, too. What’re’ya, twelve? Y’want cancer?”

“Yeah, old man, I want fucking cancer,” Bradley sniped back, the verbal equivalent of an inky full stop punched down by a type writer. Black, and messy, and bleeding. She’d swallow it, if she could. Taste how angry it was on the way down. See if it put a finish to all the words in her stomach, so she could finally shit them out and be done with them: ‘stop’, and ‘please’, and ‘don’t’.

'I’ and ‘love’ and ‘you’.

‘Stay’ and ‘please’ and ‘please’ and ‘please’ and--

“Y’think you’re tough shit, huh? Jeez’ oh Lou. Cancer or not, y’can’t sit there.” 

Bradley had another drag on her cigarette. She’d watched her mother enough to know how to inhale them properly, and she did it the same way -- chin tipped up, ribs frozen as they held it just to spite the bastards down in corporate. Lungs, suited up and fiddling with cuff links. Fuck them, anyway. Who needs them, anyway. Anyway, anyway, anyway.

Something about trains soothed her and made her angry, all at once. 

Apparently realising he wasn’t going to get through to her, he took a different approach. Softened his edges, a little.

“How old are you, kid?”

Instantly, her head snapped in his direction. Maybe he thought he’d got somewhere, by the smile that twitched to life, Frankenstein’s limb reanimated by a sparking prong. Maybe he thought he’d broken through. 

“Why’d you wanna know, fucker? Are you a fucking paedophile?”

Visibly shocked, he held up his hands in surrender.

In fact, he didn’t even say anything when she slipped down from the platform edge and started walking the tracks.

By the time Bradley had leveraged herself into the desired spot, a boot firm on a protruding brick and black nails braced to pull her upright, she’d started thinking about it again. Sitting there, on the two story roof of a vacant building, overlooking the tracks, she couldn’t think about anything but.

Her eyes shut, and she ignored distant sirens as she went through a mental checklist. It had only been a week, but she’d reviewed it so much that the corners were dogeared -- yellowing, even. The paper could barely be spread flat, for fear it would tear.

True or false: you own a toy train set.

She kept her eyes closed tight, as she lifted her hand, swiping at a dribble of vodka on her chin. She’d wriggled a small bottle out of the pocket of her black duffel, stolen from a local convenience store.

True or false: sometimes, you’d lie flat on your belly to watch it go by, up close. Sometimes you wanted it to catch your nose. You dared it to. 

True or false: the windows on the steam engine looked like breadcrumbs. You could hardly make out the people inside it, but you counted them all to a head. Eleven, to a carriage. Twelve, if you counted a smudge to the far left. It looked more ghost than person.

True or false: this ghost has always been your favourite. Sometimes, you used to call it mom. You can’t bring yourself to, any more.

Mentally stuttering, a black moth caught inside of a net curtain, Bradley swigged again from her vodka. Coughed, under her breath, and ignored the sound of a train coming.

True or false: the last time you played with the train, you heard voices.

True or false: this is a memory, not a dream.

This was the part where it got tricky. This was the part where she stopped knowing which box to check.

True or false: the voices came in snippets.

“--saying it’ll be cleaner. No fuss. Grab it, will you?”

Bradley kept her eyes shut. She had to keep her eyes shut.

“Just clean it up. Just grab it, and get it out of here.”

The rail lines were squealing. She could hear a pigeon cooing, overhead, and all she wanted to do was grab a stone and hurl it. Shut it up. Shut up everything.

True or false: there was a set of shoes poking out from behind the door. Something was troubling about them -- some niggling thought floating at the back of your mind. They were sticking out from behind the wood like a door stop.

This part of the list was the point where she usually wanted to stop. She usually couldn’t continue. 

True or false: they were your mother’s shoes. 

She was holding the bottle so tight that her shoulders were shaking. It felt like something was trying to hatch, inside of her, and she kept swallowing the hands that scrabbled towards an exit. Sometimes, when she drank enough, she could feel it rapping fists at the backs of her teeth, knocking for the world to finally let it out.

Unleash me. Give in, and unleash me. Accept it. Accept what you already know. 

True or false: they were your mother’s shoes, and somebody limp was wearing them.

The screech of a train can swallow a scream, if you time it right.

Not just a feeble one, either. Full bodied. The kind that curls your toes, has you imagining them sprouting talons, and rooting in the dirt to keep you from keeling.

As it came barrelling by, the scream Bradley let out was so loud, she thought maybe the sky would split. She thought maybe the world would tear a hole, and she’d fall right through it.

Some questions are better when you pretend you don’t know the answer.

Like true or false.

Like memory or dream.

Like would you care, if you fell through the hole? Would you even fight it?