The Train That Never Stops
a midnight broadcast for anyone who missed their station on purpose
The night begins with the sound of rails humming under your bones.
Not a train you can see yet — just the idea of one, stitched to the dark like a promise.
You tell yourself you're only walking to clear your head.
But your feet know where they're going long before you do.
There's an old commuter platform at the edge of the city, the kind that still keeps its clocks even though no one cares about them.
The sign over the stairs is half-broken, vowels missing, as if the station forgot how to speak.
On the timetable board, every departure says the same thing:
ON TIME — UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
You breathe into your hands, and your breath looks like fog trying to remember a shape.
A light appears down the line — small, patient, unhurried — and you feel the rails answer it, a low animal in the earth.
No footsteps.
No staff.
Just you and the yellow line that says please do not cross, even though it has never once explained why.
The light grows.
Wind pulls at your coat.
A single moth rattles in the glass of the shelter as if it means to warn you.
The train glides in without braking.
No engine noise.
No metal scream.
Just a long, soft exhale, and suddenly doors are open everywhere like the hotel of a dream.
You step in because the door expects you.
The car smells faintly of warm dust and old conversations.
Seats face each other as if to remind you that people once did.
On the ceiling, a route map snakes across the car, pale lines connecting stations you've never heard of: Mirrorfield. Low Tide. Orchard End. Untitled.
Someone has circled one in pencil.
It's labeled Again.
The doors close like an apology.
The floor lifts you a fraction.
The world outside begins moving exactly as fast as your heartbeat.
A speaker clears its throat, polite as a librarian.
The voice that comes through isn't a voice, not at first — more like a memory translated into sound.
Good evening.
Thank you for boarding.
You are on the Last Service.
We will be calling at all stations except the ones you needed.
You laugh, because it's kind, and because it's true.
The train slides past the end of the platform without slowing.
Beyond the glass, the city unspools: windows lit like habits, parking lots dreaming of rain.
You expect fluorescent light, the indifferent kind, but the carriage keeps itself dim, as if it knows you're tired.
A woman sits across from you.
You hadn't seen her when you got on.
She wears a coat the color of a quiet street and holds a paper cup as if it's sleep.
Her eyes are closed, but her mouth says the station names under her breath, as if she's folding laundry.
The voice returns.
Next stop: Between.
Change here for Regret and Second Thought.
Someone pulls the emergency cord out of habit.
Nothing happens.
Not even a chime.
The cord dangles like a loose thought and pretends to be helpful.
You look down the length of the car.
Everyone here looks almost familiar — the blurred faces you remember from other nights, other trains, the kind of strangers you thought you were done becoming.
No one meets your eye.
This is a kindness.
The woman across from you opens one eye.
"Did you mean to board?" she asks, as if weather were a decision.
"I didn't mean not to."
"Same difference," she says, and sips the coffee that isn't there.
The doors open onto darkness and wind for a station that might be Between.
No platform appears.
The announcement thanks no one.
The doors close again.
You tilt your head and the whole train follows.
Out the window: a row of houses, every curtain drawn, every light left on as if a thought stepped out and forgot to return.
You can see into a kitchen you used to know — same tile, same kettle left hissing like an old argument.
It slides by before you can apologize.
A seat near the door is occupied by a stack of folded coats.
They breathe when the car does.
The map above your head flickers.
The circle around Again pulses like a heartbeat beneath tracing paper.
We will be making an additional stop, the voice says, at Until.
Please remain seated during expectations.
You try the window latch even though there is none.
A small note is printed on the glass in very polite text:
DO NOT LEAN OUT. THE WIND HAS BEEN LAID OFF.
Beyond your reflection, the tunnel becomes a long mirror full of patient mistakes.
Sometimes your face blinks a half-second late.
Sometimes it doesn't blink at all.
A soft chime.
Not the emergency one.
The other one — the one that sounds like a doorbell in a house you used to rent.
We remind passengers, says the voice, that fare can be paid in cash, card, or recollection.
Please present your memories at the next inspection.
Exact change is appreciated.
The conductor steps into the car.
You don't see the door open.
He is simply there, the way a conclusion appears once you stop arguing with yourself.
His cap carries no emblem.
His eyes carry a schedule that cannot be read without sleep.
"Tickets, please," he says, and the whole train inhales.
Passengers present stubs, wristwatches, a single button from a coat, a name said softly once and never again.
He punches the air above each offering, and a small circle of time falls out and disappears under the seat.
When he reaches you, you have nothing ready.
Every proof of your journey seems to have stayed home.
"I can pay later," you say, the way people do when they are out of apologies.
"Later," he repeats, as if tasting a word no timetable would dare to print.
Then he leans close enough for you to see the reflection of yourself in the brass of his whistle.
"It's all later here," he says. "Relax."
He stamps the air above your empty hands.
Something light leaves you through the hole.
You feel better and do not ask why.
The train exits the tunnel and the windows open onto a countryside you have never visited and somehow helped plant.
Fields arranged like chessboards.
A solitary water tower blinking its little red eye like a lighthouse that gave up on water.
The car door at the far end opens without sound.
A boy steps in, carrying a cardboard model of a train that looks exactly like this one, down to the scratch you just noticed on the floor.
He seats the model on the seat beside him and waits for it to say something.
When it doesn't, he pats it as if it tried.
Next stop: Low Tide.
All doors will open where they remember how.
The woman across from you folds her empty cup precisely in half.
"You shouldn't get off there," she says.
"I wasn't going to."
"You shouldn't get off anywhere," she says, and closes her eye again.
A cat trots down the aisle like a small inspector.
Its fur carries the color of tunnels.
It chooses the seat opposite the boy and regards the cardboard train with professional interest.
When the model fails to pass inspection, the cat allows itself to approve anyway.
The train slows as if remembering how.
Outside, a platform floats where the sea should be.
Drowned advertisements complain softly into the night.
A gull stands on one leg and dreams of an administrative position.
No one boards.
No one leaves.
The doors close with a sigh that could almost be relief.
The voice returns, different now, like the same person after they've admitted something to themselves.
We will be running without stopping until further notice.
If you have connections, please…
— it pauses —
…let them go ahead.
The boy at the end of the car opens the cardboard train.
Inside, instead of seats, there is a long strip of paper covered in the names of stations you've never allowed yourself to visit.
He looks at you as if to say, I found your list.
Before you can respond, the lights blink twice and settle into the particular glow of an office after everyone has left.
A new passenger sits down beside you.
He wears your face but not your age.
His hair is arranged the way it was the year you believed in sharpness.
"Long time," he says.
"It wasn't on purpose."
"Nothing is," he says, and rests his forehead against the glass as if the night might take him in out of pity.
The conductor passes again.
He does not ask your double for a ticket.
He simply nods to him, the way colleagues do when they have already discussed the thing that matters.
"Where does this train go?" you ask, because someone has to ask for the sake of manners.
"All the way," the conductor says.
"All the way where?"
He checked his watch before he answered.
This is courteous; it means he intends to tell the truth.
"To the part after arrival," he says, and moves on.
You and your earlier face watch each other in the window like two quiet mistakes that finally stopped arguing.
"What happens if we pull the emergency brake?" you ask him, though you already know.
"They admire your initiative," he says. "Then they ask if you'd like to try again."
He says they the way a person says gravity.
Another chime like a decision being made in a room you do not own.
We will shortly be passing Untitled, says the voice.
For your safety, please refrain from naming anything you cannot keep.
Your face in the glass smiles as if remembering something not unkind.
Your earlier you does not smile back.
This is also kind.
The cat gets bored of the cardboard train and moves to the seat beside you.
It settles with the confidence of someone who has already proven enough.
Its ear flicks toward the speaker, but it does not look.
It knows the announcements by heart.
From somewhere near the coupling between cars comes the slow, steady sound of someone trying to tie a knot while listening to the sea.
You imagine a hand you used to hold.
You imagine letting go correctly and without waste.
The train obliges your imagination by giving you a window for it.
Outside: a town where every porch light has been turned on for you and is too polite to admit otherwise.
The road leading away is clean as a thought.
The woman across from you opens both eyes for the first time and studies your shoes.
"Comfortable?" she asks.
"I walked here," you say.
"Walking isn't the same as arriving," she says, and then the car whispers something like an apology under the wheels.
The boy reaches the end of his paper strip and tucks it back into the cardboard train.
He has added a new stop in pencil: Soon.
A vibration runs down the train as if someone at the front remembered a song.
You feel the whole thing lean as the line curves toward a lake that wasn't there until the rails insisted.
Moonlight performs a simple trick with water and becomes proof.
The voice in the speaker breathes.
We are now approaching an hour you know by heart.
Local time on this service is 3:07 a.m.
If you are reading a clock and it disagrees, please consider that some clocks don't want to end your evening.
Someone laughs near the doors.
It might be you.
You're not the only one who recognizes this hour.
The car warms a degree, the exact amount necessary for remembering to forgive yourself gently later.
The conductor returns, empty-handed this time, and rests his palm against the car as if to feel its temperature.
"Final checks," he says softly, mostly to the train.
Then to you: "Any luggage?"
You look around for the suitcase you deserve and find none.
"Just what's between stops," you say.
"A common carry-on," he says, and his face does something surprising — it almost smiles.
The doors open onto a station platform bathed in the pale light of when-you-first-began.
The sign reads Origin, but someone has crossed it out and written Home in a child's hand.
You feel the car tilt forward infinitesimally, begging for this one exception, this one time.
The conductor watches you very carefully now, not as a policeman, but as someone who has seen a certain story too often to pretend otherwise.
The woman shakes her head once.
"Not yet," she says.
The cat closes its eyes and decides on your behalf.
You stay seated.
The doors close without argument.
The rails hum approval down to the center of the earth.
You pass Origin as if it were a polite stranger you'll speak to another day, because you genuinely mean to.
The boy at the end of the car waves his cardboard train at the window as the platform slides by.
For a moment, the model casts a shadow on the glass that is exactly the shape of everything you thought you would be by now.
The next tunnel is the kind that belongs to no city and all of them.
It is long enough for thoughts to have time to grow into decisions and short enough for those decisions to remain possibly good.
The lights inside the car dim to the just-right blur of old cinema.
The voice says very softly:
If you are trying to sleep, we will assist without stopping.
Please keep your eyes where you would like dawn to find them.
Your earlier face fades from the window as if it was never there, which is as true as anything.
In its place, your present face settles into a calm that is not quite earned but has chosen you anyway.
The cat reaches a paw to your knee without looking, as if to measure the distance to a place only it knows.
The conductor clears his throat — a formality before a thing that does not need formality.
"We're going to accelerate now," he says. "You will not feel a thing."
The train lifts a fraction from the rails.
A sound like a string being tuned comes from somewhere well-behaved.
The windows become smoother than glass, more like thought.
Stations slide past too quickly to read, which is merciful.
One train car ahead, someone cries with relief for exactly three seconds.
No one turns.
A good car knows how to keep a secret.
The boy with the model yawns precisely the way you used to when a parent carried you from car seat to bed while pretending you were still asleep.
His pencil rolls into the aisle and stops at your foot as if asking to be remembered later.
The woman across from you has fully woken but pretends not to be.
You recognize the move and let her keep it.
You almost doze.
Your head tilts against the window and returns without stickiness.
The vibration under your bones unfurls like a blanket that understands your temperature.
And then, because the story promised you, the world slows without sound.
The rails align with something that isn't rails anymore.
The car breathes a long, long breath.
The voice returns, the kind it uses when it means to say something you don't have to believe for it to help you.
Next and final stop: All The Way.
Passengers for Arrival, After, and Because please prepare to remain seated.
We remind you that stepping onto the platform is optional, but stopping is not.
The doors open onto a station without edges.
No pillars.
No ads.
Just air that has decided to behave.
The platform is occupied by no one and everyone you have ever meant to become.
They wave without hands.
You wave back without moving.
The conductor takes off his cap and holds it to his chest.
"This is where we do nothing," he says. "Correctly."
The woman stands, stretches the way cats taught her, and nods to you with a softness she refuses to name.
"It's enough," she says, and steps not onto the platform but into a breath she has been saving.
The boy lifts his model train and listens to it carefully.
Whatever it says satisfies him.
He and the cat exchange an understanding only trains and cats have ever shared.
They do not leave.
The car remains.
It does this with dignity.
The clock above the platform reads 3:07 for as long as it needs to.
Then — because even stories must spare themselves — it forgets to advance.
The voice in the speaker offers you one last courtesy.
If you have nothing to declare, please declare nothing.
We will carry it for you.
You decide.
You decide by not deciding.
The train accepts your choice as if it were the correct answer on a test you wrote last year.
The doors close like lips keeping a promise.
The conductor replaces his cap and salutes the platform that is also a sky.
"Back we go," he says to the train.
To you: "We'll pass your stop again, and again, and then again after that. It's all right if you don't stand. We are very patient here."
The train moves.
You watch the platform slide into the kind of distance that does not punish you.
You let the window hold your reflection gently by the face.
You blink and your eyes are yours this time.
The boy falls asleep upright, the pencil still at your shoe.
You nudge it toward him with the sort of precision that makes a future possible.
The cat changes its mind about where to sit and decides your lap is a station.
It kneads your coat once, twice, and the car hum joins your pulse without asking.
The conductor walks the aisle without looking like he is.
He glances at you the way one old commuter nods to another on a morning when pink sky forgives everything.
"We'll be running through the night," he says. "We always do."
You believe him.
You look for the sign you know is coming.
It arrives like weather.
Next stop: Again.
The rails sing what rails always sing.
The windows keep their promise to show you the parts you can bear.
You rest your head against the glass and the night pretends to be gentle until it finds that it is.
Somewhere far ahead, dawn is building its little house.
It will be ready when you are, and not a moment sooner.
The train never stops.
You do not have to either.
Not yet.
Breathe now.
We'll carry the rest.
The hum deepens.
It's not motion anymore, but a purr that fills the bones of the car.
Soft. Persistent.
Like contentment pretending to be distance.
You close your eyes.
The air sways, heavier now, as though someone has thrown a blanket over the whole world.
Inside it, time breathes unevenly.
Every inhale stretches longer than it should.
Every exhale forgets to end.
Somewhere toward the front of the train, a door opens and stays open.
The sound it makes isn't metal.
It's fabric.
It rustles.
The conductor's footsteps travel down the aisle — slower, softer, dragging the shape of thought behind them.
He pauses beside your seat, not to check tickets, but to listen.
"Still awake," he murmurs, almost fond.
You pretend not to hear.
It's easier than answering questions you haven't been asked.
The cat lifts its head from your lap, eyes reflecting the emergency light.
Something moves behind those pupils — the way clocks move when no one is watching.
It looks at the conductor, then at you.
Then it yawns, wide and quiet, like a door to another sentence.
The conductor kneels, smoothing a wrinkle on the carpet that isn't there.
"The schedule's wrong," he says, as if the train had confessed it.
"Has been for some time."
You wait for him to leave.
He doesn't.
"Ever notice," he says, "how we never see the front of the train? Or the end?"
He smiles at his own thought, pleased the way cats are when the wind does something correctly.
"I used to think I was taking passengers somewhere.
Now I think the train takes us."
The cat blinks once — slow, deliberate — and the carriage hums in agreement.
You look down the aisle.
The boy is gone.
His cardboard train sits folded flat on the seat, like a ticket someone couldn't use.
The woman has vanished too, though her folded cup remains — half full of darkness that doesn't spill.
The conductor stands.
"You might be the reason, you know," he says.
"Every route needs an observer. Otherwise, the rails forget to exist."
He waits for you to argue.
You don't.
He tips his cap, satisfied.
When he walks away, the sound of his steps continues even after he has vanished — the echo of something committed to happening.
The cat stretches, shakes out its fur, and steps onto the floor.
Its paws make no sound.
It walks toward the front of the car, tail flicking in rhythm with the wheels.
Each flick bends the air.
You follow, because that's what the quiet demands.
The next carriage is darker.
No seats — only windows, and through them, the same scene repeating: fields, lights, the occasional road turning endlessly back on itself.
Each version a little older, a little more faded, like memories left in the sun too long.
In the center of the car, a single lamp swings gently from the ceiling.
The cat sits beneath it, eyes half-closed, as if judging the light.
You stop beside it.
The air smells of electricity and something faintly feline — sleep, maybe.
"Where does it end?" you ask, surprising yourself.
The cat turns its head slowly.
Its mouth doesn't move, but the answer arrives anyway.
It doesn't. You do.
You reach for the wall to steady yourself, but the wall isn't solid anymore.
It breathes.
Through it, you glimpse other cars — hundreds, thousands, a serpentine repetition vanishing into a horizon that curves back inward.
Each carriage holds a you at a slightly different angle of surrender: eyes open, eyes shut, hand lifted, hand gone.
The cat watches you study yourself.
It seems satisfied, as if you've performed correctly.
Someone has to stay awake, the thought hums.
Someone has to believe the motion means direction.
You turn toward the door at the far end.
The handle glows faintly, waiting.
The hum deepens to a note just below hearing — a sound the body understands before the mind does.
The cat follows, padding close behind, tail brushing your leg like punctuation.
The next car is filled with mirrors.
All the seats are gone; instead, rows of glass line the walls.
Each mirror holds a reflection that doesn't quite keep up.
In one, you're already halfway through the door.
In another, you haven't arrived yet.
The cat's reflection is the only one that matches.
You move between them.
Every step forward leaves an echo behind that tries to mimic you, a half-second late.
Soon the air is thick with versions.
Their breathing overlaps yours until you can't tell who's leading.
The speaker crackles — faint, hesitant, almost shy.
A voice, not the conductor's, not the polite announcer's.
Yours.
"Attention passengers," it says.
"Please remain seated.
Movement confuses the line."
The cat hisses softly, but not at the voice — at your hesitation.
You take another step forward.
The floor flexes.
Through the mirrors, something stirs — a tremor running through the reflections.
Your many faces glance at one another, unsure who to follow.
One reaches out, palm against glass.
Another does the same, from the other side.
When your hand meets it, the surface gives like skin.
You pull back.
The reflection doesn't.
It stays pressed to the glass, mouth moving silently, words forming shapes you can almost read:
Stay asleep.
The cat leaps into your arms — a sudden weight, real, grounding.
Its fur smells like metal and forgiveness.
Its purr vibrates through your ribs, syncing perfectly with the rhythm of the train.
It looks up at you, eyes calm, infinite.
You're the stop, it says without sound.
We all board you.
The mirrors begin to cloud, fog blooming outward until every surface is silver with breath.
Behind the haze, your other selves fade one by one, taking their noise with them.
When the last vanishes, the car is silent again.
The train slows.
Not braking — just deciding to think more carefully.
Outside, dawn bleeds along the horizon, a thin red line drawn by someone unsure where the page ends.
You sit on the floor, the cat still in your arms.
The hum has settled into something like a heartbeat — not yours, not the train's, but shared.
The speaker clears its throat.
The original voice returns, gentle now.
We are now passing Stillpoint.
Passengers wishing to disembark may remain.
Passengers wishing to remain may disembark.
The cat jumps down, tail brushing your knee in thanks or farewell — it's impossible to say which.
It pads to the nearest door, and without ceremony, steps through the seam as if air were a curtain.
You stay.
Not because you must, but because the train feels lighter when you do.
The lights brighten slightly.
Someone somewhere rings a small bell.
It could be the conductor.
It could be you.
The window beside you shows no scenery now, only the color of breathing.
You lean against it and feel the vibration settle into something kind.
You close your eyes.
The voice says one last thing — quiet enough to sound like a thought you almost had:
We'll keep moving for you.
You just keep dreaming for us.
The train hums.
The world outside becomes gentle static.
And in the space between motion and meaning,
everything finally learns how to stay.
End of The Train That Never Stops