About What If You Slept
by AJ Wilde
37 pages
/ 12500 words
ISBN-13: 978-1-60370-107-5
ISBN-10: 1-60370-107-9
Available file types - lit, pdf, prc, html
Nick's done being a lawyer with responsibilities. Abandoning his routine, he jumps on the first train leaving Toronto and meets Chris, a charming, laid back man on his way north to visit his grandmother.
As the train carries Nick away from the familiar and into the new, he finds himself tumbling headlong for Chris, interesting and compelling as he is. In the space of a few hours, Nick thinks he's made a friend and found a lover. But there's more to Chris' story than Nick realizes and journey's end turns out to be another fresh start for both of them.
Sample
There's something surreal about a train station. The vast space seems formless and vague, like a Salvador Dali painting. A blank canvas, ready for a portrait of a thousand disconnected lives. You stand alone in the concourse, surrounded by bodies rushing in all directions, like faceless figures from a tangled dream.
Your fellow travellers don't appear to see you; they jostle and bump you without apology or even acknowledgement of your presence. Some even try to walk right through you, as though you had no physical existence at all. Maybe in the night, you swallowed a drug that rendered you transparent? You swirl your invisibility cloak with a smug flourish, and blunder your way to the ticket kiosk.
"Destination?" The gray-suited ticket clerk looks down. Even he cannot meet your eyes.
"Cochrane."
"The end of the line." He makes a face that you assume is intended to be funny. If he only knew. You fumble for money.
The Bedford limestone facade of Union Station in Toronto is an architectural glimpse backward to the 1920s, when the railway was the backbone of the nation and Toronto was still Hogtown: the gritty hub of Ontario and Point A of journeys. Around the high interior walls of the great hall, the names carved in proud capitals evoke the dreams of travellers long past - exotic, faraway-sounding places: Sarnia, Sault Ste. Marie, Moose Jaw, Prince Rupert. Japanese tourists crane their necks, peering through Nikon lenses at the cathedral-like vaulted ceiling. Afterwards, they feel dizzy.
In these hallowed marble halls, heavy with the legacy of the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific, the dream lives on in every backpacking student, sullen commuter, squabbling family, and trolley-trundling CEO that pounds these platforms every single day. In the underpass that leads to the warren of underground tunnels that swarm through the city, piles of old clothes lie in corners, discarded, swept out of sight with crumpled pizza boxes and yesterday’s papers. On closer inspection, you see that they are people. Their dreams died long ago. Spare some change please? I don't have any change. Get a job. Spare some change pleassse? Their toneless mantra follows you, hissing like a hungry viper in your guilty ears. A pigeon flies up almost into your face and you run through the stifling crowd, to your train and safety.