A surreal offering of flash fiction where a deceased father’s passion comes speeding back to life….
by: Spencer Keene
Of all the hobbies for a grown man to have, building model railroads was surely among the oddest. Even as an eleven-year-old boy, I was dimly aware that my father’s passion for toy trains was out of the ordinary for a man of his age. And yet, my mother and I encouraged his curious enthusiasm. When he was working on his trains, he wasn’t thinking about the co-workers he hated or the cancer that riddled his bones.
When death finally took him, my father had been in the middle of his most ambitious railroad project to date. Our living room looked like a museum of miniatures with tiny train tracks snaking around the dining set, over the coffee table, under my grandfather’s rocking chair. On his deathbed, my father expressed his deep regret at having failed to complete the project before succumbing to the disease that ended his life. In his honor, my mother and I decided to hold off on disassembling it. Sure, it was a little inconvenient to navigate around the house. But we couldn’t help but think that it was what my father would have wanted.
It was a day or two after my father’s death when I realized that progress on his railroad project had continued apace. At first, I assumed that my mother was responsible, using it as a method to work through her grief, perhaps. It turns out that my mother had assumed the same about me. Neither of us bothered to mention it to the other, and we both observed in mute fascination as the winding length of track continued to grow.
One evening, my mother and I were sitting in the living room watching television, the screen partially obscured by a dipping section of track. Suddenly, we both noticed a small black object floating through the air. Neither of us moved an inch or made a sound. The object hovered slowly over to the sideboard and clicked into place — the final missing piece of my father’s project. That’s when the train cars roared to life.
The toy locomotive zipped past a black-and-white crossbuck, its red light flashing. The engine chugged along the track, its shrill whistle echoing through the living room. I watched, awestruck, as the train dipped under and climbed over the furniture, whipping around corners without slowing its breakneck pace.
My mother and I stared at each other, our jaws agape and our eyes bulging. Almost simultaneously, we both burst into peals of laughter. Tears streamed down our reddening cheeks as the train flew around us, blasting its whistle and chugging mightily. At that moment, I felt dead certain that my father was there too, laughing along with us and grinning from ear to ear.
Spencer Keene is a writer from Vancouver, British Columbia. He works for a public legal education organization and loves to write poetry and short fiction in his spare time. His work has been published in SAD Magazine.
