earth tides

KRISTIN ALLIO

The train slid through the forest, ultra green. Loved loved seeing you. She’d spent the weekend with her friend in a cabin in Maine. The smallest exchanges, smoothest beads of cliché were what she choked on. She could smell the engine. Fossil fuel was a beautiful bit of poetry, if love needed proof, the blessing of the ages. Piney and full breasted, cleavages between needle-covered mounds.

Her friend’s cabin was like a treehouse on the ground. You’re so good here, she’d said searchingly, as her friend took pains to cook two real dinners.

The train slowed through a corridor of classy young poplars, and then with no warning, starting traveling backwards. Going over the same material, bittersweet, goldenrod, adolescent oaks. Maine Medical was a fortress on a hill—the outskirts of Portland.

Bubble letters in swimming pool colors covered the disconnected cars in the railyard when the train began moving slowly forward again. Just an email. Her friend used the little pool of Wi-Fi outside the nearest town’s one-room library.

The cabin had two tiny uninsulated bedrooms.

She surrendered her phone. She’d do it when she got home, a drink within reach, a drink so happy to be a drink it cracked its own ice cubes. The last time her friend was in the city they’d accidentally gone dancing. A post wedding party took over the bar, flushed groomsmen plowed tables to the walls. Her friend was pulled onto the dance floor by bridesmaids bursting out of dresses they’d only just starved into, and within moments someone had grabbed her too, seeing the situation, and then she and her friend became the wedding party’s mascot, good-luck strangers everybody wanted to buy drinks for.

A beach strip that was entirely asphalt. Any Item, $9.99 or Less seemed to be the name of a store. A rainbow-colored amusement park, the kind that folded up and stacked on the bed of a truck at the end of the season. How did the sea just stop, under ground? Earth tides. How many people have died in human history? She couldn’t stop herself from typing into her phone’s god. The Internet’s favorite kind of question. The train shook the air against the back sides of cheap motels with vents instead of windows. She imagined shower stalls like coffins stood on end. The bathroom in the cabin was all wood, even the toilet. They took their showers with the door open in order to keep talking. Her heart broke. Her friend said, Take my bathrobe. She brushed her teeth, then waited on the blanket-covered couch while her friend showered.

The train sounded a woeful foghorn. Asia Chinese Restaurant. Holy Rosary Credit Union. A thick green river. In the town named after a prep school, or the other way around, a boy with floppy hair and deerskin moccasins crossed a parking lot learning to walk hard, like a man.