The 21:05 Train to Slough

It's about time I wrote another short story. I had the idea for a lot of concepts for this one, but couldn't think of how put them together, so for now I just used what I had for a "test of concept" chapter, which I may develop at a later date. 

The 21:05 Train to Slough

          It’s an odd sensation, dying. It’s that off feeling of “nothing”, when it really means nothing—nothing without the word to give it a name, because surely describing it makes it “something”? Anyway, I should probably give this some context. I died… and also didn’t.        

  I had been walking home from work. That late shift at the office, which I always dreaded but did out of the necessity for the 20% extra money it gives. I work at a life insurance firm. Go figure! So I walk home, as normal, for about three miles between the office and my crappy apartment South-east of the city. There’s not many people about at this time; it’s late as anything; all you see really is the couple of people waddling home from work like myself, or a gaggle of young women going down town to get pissed at the club on WKD.      

   I passed over the old bridge that cradles the rail line going up to Slough, over-grown in places with unkempt weeds, shrubs and trees. Everything was a little bit orange from the single street light that illuminated the light drizzle of rain I didn’t even know was coming down, even with the busses going past and making that moist fffwhoosh sound that you get when the ground’s wet. No wonder I was cold.     

    Now, I do say, I was quite far away from the wall that separates you on the bridge from the steel oblivion of rail line below, and suicide was never a thing I considered. Why would I? I had good stake still in the freezer! Yet somehow, in a rather bizarre and inexplicable manner, seeming as there was no one else around either, I suddenly got swept off of my feet over the wall, and down into blackness.       

    I was a little confused when I woke. All I could see was a lump, draped in denim, with blood pooling in the creases. It took me a moment to realise I was staring at my own arse. I had fell off the bridge, rather flew, and landed just in time to catch the 21:05 train. I was cut clean in half by the rails. And there I was, laying in the gravel on the cold steel line, staring right at my own arse which had been thrown there by the force of the train. I couldn’t feel any pain, I’m glad for that. I tried shifting a bit, and found I was missing my left arm as well.          Rattling from under the bridge caught my attention. Straining, I saw in the shadow of the archway the glinting corner of a shopping trolley. More emerged into the light to reveal the homeless man pushing it, stooping down occasionally to pick up discarded beer cans to add to the collection he had amassed. I attempted a groan. The man, bleary eyed with a stubbly chin, look up and finally saw me. He cried out and turned to run without the slightest thought to help me. Shit. Thanks then, I guess.        

  With an awkward turn I finally saw where my arm had been discarded. I’ve heard how people get phantom limb when they get an arm or leg amputated. I thought I had that then. I still had the sensation of having an arm. I exercised it. Where was the harm in it? I couldn’t feel any pain. Then the arm, as I looked at it, twitched and moved. I stopped my teasing of the phantom limb, and the real limb stopped twitching. What the hell? I thought hard about moving my arm, and what do you know, my severed limb began to move! I thought Right, I can do this... Right? The arm squirmed and quivered until the fingers found their ground, and slowly but surely began inching toward me. When it was close enough I grabbed it with the one appendage I had left. I could still feel everything in the severed arm!
  

   Say I had a hunch; at the time it certainly was, although as I begin thinking about it I must have knew to do it. I raised my arm back up to the stump it had been rendered from and, with the strangest tingling sensation, it began knitting itself back together. It's like it was never off. I flexed my fingers in front of me, not quite comprehending what had happened. I look back to the mangled mess of my legs. With an exerted mental effort they too began to twitch. A bit of shuffling and grunting later, I aligned my torso back up with my hips and, just like my arm, my body stitched itself back together without so much as a mark where the two halves fused.          

   I achingly pushed myself to my feet and tested the ground. Everything span for a moment or two. I heaved, and threw up a mixture of vomit and blood. Lovely. I mean, in the scenario it didn't seem to pose as so shocking of a thing to me, What was on my mind was how I was alive altogether. I began walking to get back onto the road above. Had I really been cut apart like that? Had I even fallen off the bridge to begin with? And then something came to my mind as I walked on. It must have been some dream I had when I was blacked out.        

   It was nothingness. Pure nothingness, that slowly throbbed and morphed into pale and indistinct shapes that had slight hints of being the rail line, the bridge, and the trees framing it all. All about shifted and flowed into themselves like geometric nets crossing over. God! MC Escher eat your heart out!Out from this drew a dark, stooping figure. It approached, ethereal, with a sigh and a shake of the head. It looked at a clipboard it clutched with long, bony fingers and sighed again.      

    'Sorry chap. Not your time, I'm afraid. Must have been a mistake in the paper work.'   'Wait, what?' I said in an echo.   'You'll find out soon enough. I'll give you another 45 years at a safe minimum. Good luck to you.'He looked about as if he could comprehend the flowing mass of geometry around us.   'You really got yourself in a mess, didn't you? Hmmm. I suppose I will have to let you fix that.'        

   With these last words the apparition disintegrated, marking when I woke up. What was that being? It certainly didn't register in my mind as any person, or a thing of this world altogether. And what business did it conduct on that clipboard? In my walking I came up to the main junction cornered by the Hare and Wheel pub. I might as well. My mind still raced as I walked through the door. Was that thing really what I think it is? If so, in that moment of other worldliness, I had truly died. Yet I am still here. Can I actually die? The grey-haired geezer behind the bar had a right start when I entered the pub. I didn't think about all the people looking at me oddly as I walked down the streets at this hour. I looked down at the bloody, torn mess of my clothes.           

  'Uh, yeah; fancy dress party.' I explained, trying to be as nonchalant as possible.   'Right...'   'Make it a bottle of whisky.'He hesitated before reaching me down a big bottle of Bourbon and a glass. I twisted the cap off and drank straight from the bottle.   'Jesus Christ! Are you trying to kill yourself?' The bartender cried in ignorance.          

  The alcohol burnt as it went down. One thing I had realised soon after waking was my distinct lack of a heartbeat. It still would not come with this. The drink trickled from the corners of my mouth and down my chin. I had never felt so alive in my life.