The Train

It was late summer, the kind of evening where the sun hangs low, spilling gold across everything it touches. I’d just left Miller Beach after my afternoon walk, a little bit of sand still in my shoes. The road stretched alongside an empty track, US Steel vast just beyond the tracks, the lake there but hidden by the rise and fall of the land, the road wide and free for speed, gleaming in the sun, vibrating faintly under the tires. The air was warm, salty, with familiar smells of the steel plant in the air.

I had the windows down, the cassette player in my Buick Skylark playing —T.I. and Rihanna singing Live Your Life. The hum of the car mixed with the music, and for a moment, everything was calm.

Then it came—the low, metallic rumble. A train.

I checked the rearview mirror. Nothing. No glint of wheels, no dark line cutting across the horizon. Just the sound, growing louder, and the vibration under the tires pressing through my palms. The sound of steel seemed to hum louder and louder, amplifying the pressure I could feel in my chest.

Overwhelmed with fear, I hit the gas, tires crunching over the cracked asphalt, but the feeling stayed. The air seemed to thicken, the warmth turning heavy, the light shifting in a way that made shadows twitch along the edges of the road. My heartbeat thundered in rhythm with the invisible train, each pulse echoing in my head.

I turned off the main road, sliding into a quiet residential street. Gravel ground beneath my wheels. I parked, cut the engine, and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. The vibration rippled through the car, then slowly, mercifully, it stopped. The tree that hung over my car swayed peacefully as if it were trying to comfort me back into reality.

I told myself it was the devil, testing me for being "righteous". That’s what I believed back then. But it wasn’t some outside evil. It was panic—compounding, stretching like a shadow from childhood to 9/11—raw, human, pressing through the asphalt beneath my tires, as if the road itself remembered centuries of human trauma that passed over it, shaking the warmth in the air, bending the late-summer light against the edges of my mind, pressing the sun-bleached light into my chest in a way I hadn’t known I could feel.

The world was still again. The sun slipped behind the water, and the song on the radio had ended. But the tremor—the train that wasn’t there—stayed inside me, a sound I would hear again, many years later, when my mind would crack again under the weight of the pandemic.