THE PINES

Not even my mother knows where I stayed last night. It would break her heart if she did. It’s true what they say about my husband, he was a hard working man … If I’d got kids, if I was respectable someone’d take me in, but here is where the punished go to sleep.
I see him in my dreams, his jacket buttoned to his neck, a weary look on his face as he follows the long steel railway line trying to come home.  He doesn’t know he’s dead.  Sometimes when it happens sudden like that, they don’t realise and they search for the familiar. He’ll walk that line forever …

The dark of these woods is comforting, no light can penetrate, I’m able to peacefully reflect on the hot summer sun, the man I took comfort with, his lips on mine and the sweat of our skin to skin.  Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw my husband stood quietly at the door, but when I looked again he was gone. I tell myself it was my imagination, that it wasn’t because of me he was walking on the railway line when the accident happened, but because he saw some debris there and went to pick it up.

 The wind is getting up, somehow it manages to chill through the woods, it shakes the branches and weeps and mourns like a lost thing. I walk up the hill to where the trees break and the railway line stretches on and on between the pines. In the far distance, I swear I can see a figure walking along the tracks towards me.