The Arrival

Emerging from the long tunnel at the county border, it was the same platform: the lit shelter, the puddle keeping its sodium light, the four minutes the board has always promised.

No one had come to meet the train. The cold had, which is a kind of meeting. The wind rehearsed its one almost-sentence and never once finished it.

Over the loudspeaker a name, said once, then taken back - the way the shelter's light almost holds, then lets the dark in.

---

Later. How much later, the clock kept its counsel. A door opened at the back of the waiting room. A woman came out carrying the name the way you carry a hot drink - carefully, both hands.

She set it down on the bench. The name sat, the way a tired person sits. She said: here. Not almost. Here.

And the name, which had been waiting to be somebody's, was mine.