Fiction Friday - Away From Here

From September to May the roads to Zhevsk are impassable, ice and mud that not even horses can stagger through, and the only the rails are clear. But the trains don't stop in Zhevsk, not unless special arrangements are made. They slow down ahead of the grade, and if one wanted, one could leap aboard and ride to Moscow or far-off Vladivostok.

Masha dreamed of the trains. There was no life for a young woman in a tiny mining town; all the men were drunk or working or both, and all the women were prematurely aged, as if no one in the town was under sixty. Even the children seemed beaten down by the endless drudgery of life. Masha saw wrinkles and grey in her own face every day, that had not been there the day before.

She watched the trains from her window as she did the washing. Her mother thought it was a scandal that she wasn't married yet, but Masha couldn't tie herself to the walking dead. She dreamed and washed and watched.

Most of the trains were the same, cattle cars and hoppers and tired engines. But every so often a passenger train came through, and Masha could look in to see the bright faces of people headed somewhere that wasn't Zhevsk, somewhere far away and mysterious. Or perhaps just the next factory town. She knew, in her heart, that the people on the train were no brighter than anyone else. It was just the light, the knowledge that they were going somewhere, that made them look thus.

Masha found herself, as the days grew shorter again, spending more and more time sitting at the platform of the ancient station where no trains stopped, watching for passenger trains. They came no more frequently, but she saw more of them because she was there when they did come, sometimes late at night when she should have been sleeping, sometimes in the early morning before she went to work on her latest loads of laundry. They were like friends, those bright people in the cars. They didn't know she was there, but they were like friends to her.

And then one evening, a train with only one car came through. The night was cold and Masha was dozing, and she almost missed it. When she glanced up, it was almost in front of her, like it had appeared from thin air. The windows were fogged and she could see very little of what was going on inside, but there were moving shapes silhouetted in the lamplight, shapes that seemed like bodies writhing. All at once, a face appeared in the doorway at the back of the car, in shadow, but with eyes that gleamed as they stared right at her. Then the train picked up speed and vanished into the rising fog.

Masha remembered those bright eyes looking at her as she washed, as she ate, as she bathed. She rushed to the tracks as soon as night fell, but no trains came that night, and she woke almost frozen in the dawn chill. But the next night, and the next, as if called by something, she tried, and failed, to stay awake in the hope that the strange one-car train might return.

On the third day she had almost given up hope. The night was bitter, the wind clawed at her threadbare coat, and her eyes were drooping. She had just passed into that dreamlike state between awake and asleep when she was jarred awake by the clatter of wheels on the rails, and the strange train passed again, slower this time, and seemingly brighter, so she could see through the windows. And what she saw shook her. There were men, giants it seemed, naked and glistening, swollen to tumescence, around whom women, lithe, dark, and seductive, swirled like smoke rather than like humans. The interior of the train seemed to be pure copulation in all forms, of all persuasions; everywhere she looked there was shadowy sex. And as the train passed, as flesh pressed against the windows, the same face, dark and proud, and the same keen eyes, peered at her from around the frame of the door, before the train sped off again into the gloom.

Masha stopped working. She stopped sleeping or eating. She stopped talking to passers-by. She just sat all night at the old station and waited and wasted away.

At last, the train returned in the dead of night, and this time it stopped. Trains don't stop in Zhevsk, not unless special arrangements are made. But this one stopped, and Masha, faint from hunger, from longing, heard the whistle blow for her alone. And she cast off her coat, left her bag there by the bench, and walked to the door of the train, where the same face was now smiling and a hand was beckoning her. She shut her eyes as she went into the car and felt the warmth and humidity of all the breath, and she felt gentle hands remove her clothes and then kisses all over. “Welcome sister,” they said, “Welcome.”

And as the train began to move, she opened her eyes and saw the figures, still in shadow, begin to twine again, and felt the warm breath of a man as he pressed against her body, then another as he opened her legs, then the heat of a woman's kiss, and lips on her breasts, and the cold glass of the window as she was pressed against it, and she let herself be taken. The rhythm of wheel on rail became the rhythm of flesh on flesh, and where she was going no longer mattered. She was going.

---

So this will doubtless go down as the longest FFF ever, but I don't care. I'm not going to say much afterward because I don't want to blather on, but I like the idea of a sex train which rescues poor unfortunates. There's a slightly sinister aspect, but I think on the whole the train is benevolent, albeit in a strange way. And I could have written something a lot smuttier; in fact I sort of wanted to, because this picture gets me really worked up. But instead, you get this. Smutty I'll save for my own adventures.

As I said, I'm happy to collect anyone else who joins in this week, so let me know if you did. I'm not going out looking for people though because this was sort of impromptu.

Our list (obviously not including me):

• Max
• Advizor