Night Train

After leaving school, Jason worked for a national tour company. He loved leading tours, saw places and things he’d only dreamed about back home. He liked his old couples, pairs of schoolmarms, grandmothers and granddaughters, doting families, herding their luggage, ushering them off, onto buses, planes, trains, chatting, joking, telling tales he absorbed over the years. At overnight stops he dated the lonely waitresses and chambermaids.

Time glided by. Only overnights on trains disturbed him. Glimpsing the warming lights of the houses and towns silently passed in the dark, he wondered: “When will I have a home of my own?”