Write - The Quiet Between Trains

I wrote this quickly and just wrote something random, sorry If it's a little bad.94Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡt2TQrYGuQ0

wish anybody the best of luck!94Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡm01MUpfuSZ

94Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdXip73LrS9

I always knew the world ended in silence.

Not with a bang. Not with fire or ice. Just… a stillness that creeps in when nobody’s watching. That’s how it felt the day the trains stopped running.

The station’s name had been worn off the sign long before I ever got there. I’d only gone because of her—the girl in the green coat who left her sketchbook on the 3:17 to Wayward Hill.

She had a habit of forgetting things. Coffee cups on fences. Notes on bus seats. Me, once.

But that sketchbook? It wasn’t something you forget. The pages were full of faces. Not portraits—faces. Some twisted with laughter, some with grief. One that looked a little too much like mine to ignore.

I returned the next day. The same hour. Same bench. The trains didn’t come.

The announcements still played, though, as if someone hadn’t told them time had folded in on itself. “The 3:17 to Wayward Hill is delayed. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

I waited.

There was a man on the far end of the platform. He had a paper bag and a pigeon on his shoulder. He whistled something old, something half-remembered from the radio in my grandma’s kitchen. I asked him if he’d seen her.

“Who?” he asked, like the word tasted sour.

“The girl in the green coat.”

He looked past me. “Ain’t been no green here in years.”

We sat in silence for a while. Just me, him, the pigeon, and the announcements that forgot they were obsolete.

That night I went through the sketchbook again.

I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before, but near the back, in fading pencil, was a page titled: “The People Who Remember.”

Beneath it were twelve names. All scratched out except two: mine and someone named “Mara.”

That wasn’t her name. I knew that much. But it was familiar.

The next day I brought the book to the station again. I showed the man. He ran his fingers across the page like it was braille.

“Mara,” he whispered. “She was the first.”

I asked him what that meant. He didn’t answer, but handed me something—a crumpled train ticket. No destination. Just a time: 3:17.

I didn’t sleep that night. The silence had followed me home. The kind that rings in your ears and leaves your thoughts echoing.

I showed up early.

No announcements. No man. Just me and the bench and the sketchbook now heavier than guilt.

At exactly 3:17, the train pulled in.

No conductor. No passengers. Just doors opening with a soft hiss, like the platform exhaled.

I stepped inside.

The lights flickered. The walls were covered in sketches. All of them hers. All of them moving—eyes shifting, mouths whispering secrets I couldn’t hear.

In the last car, there she was.

Sitting alone. Staring out the window at nothing.

“Mara?” I asked, even though I knew it wasn’t right.

She turned slowly. “No one’s called me that in a long time.”

“What is this place?”

“A memory,” she said. “One no one else wanted to keep.”

We talked.

She told me the sketchbook wasn’t hers. Not really. It belonged to the people in it. The forgotten. The misplaced. The ones who waited on platforms for trains that never came and never asked why.

“You’re the last one,” she said.

I looked down at my hands. They felt lighter than they should.

“Why me?”

“Because you remembered,” she whispered. “Even when you didn’t want to.”

I woke up on the bench.

The station was still silent, but the sky had shifted. Not quite dawn, not quite night. That in-between where the world hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet.

The sketchbook was gone.

In its place was a single slip of paper.

Just a name:

Mara.

Underlined twice.

The train never came again. But I still go there. Every 3:17. I sit. I wait.

And sometimes… I swear I hear her humming just beyond the tracks.

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