Union Pacific

This story was a finalist in the 2024 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

Behind my house are the railroad tracks where Cassidy Jackson found the pair of legs. They were cut just below the knees, but it wasn’t a clean cut; they were crushed, and the bones looked like an Otter Pop had been smashed by a hammer. There wasn’t that much blood. The rails were clean, and the legs were clean except where they were crushed, and right there, they were just dripping a bit, like a salted steak coming to room temperature. They hardly had any hair on them, and the feet didn’t have any shoes or socks. But the weirdest thing was that the legs were black. Besides Cassidy and his family, there were just a few other black people in town, and Cassidy saw them all at lunch.

This happened on a Saturday when Cassidy came over to check on our pennies. The day before, we laid a bunch of them on the rails to see how bad the night train would flatten them. Cass somehow got past my Gram without her seeing him, but she caught me and made me take a heap of egg salad sandwich squares and snickerdoodle cookies out to share. I could barely balance the food on the plate as I opened the screen door, but I made my way out and through the overgrown grass to the rocky slope that led to the tracks. I almost fell walking up those loose rocks, but I made it up, and when I did, that’s when I dropped the plate.

Cassidy was sitting on the rail with a branch. He didn’t budge when the plate crashed and shattered. I sat down next to him where the rail was clean of food and broken ceramic. We sat there a while before either of us said or did anything.

I watched a line of ants marching from the rocks up onto the spongy severed ends of the legs. They were cutting off tiny chunks of flesh and making their trek back to the colony when Cassidy pointed out the feet. The feet were old and had pronounced veins and tiny, sparse, black, curly hairs that spotted the arch of the foot and the knuckles of the toes. The toes were stiff and straight except a few of them were curled down.

“Looks like my dad’s feet,” Cassidy said as he took up his stick.

I looked back over to where the egg salad sandwiches and cookies were scattered on the rails and ties. I saw a mess of ants splitting off from the lines that went from bloody stubs to the food. There seemed to be no difference in which trail they took. Some went to blood; others went to cookies and eggs. For a moment, I felt calm and then I felt my neck swell just below my jaw and my palms turned sweaty. I looked to Cassidy, but he was still staring at the feet. I swallowed and followed his lead.

The railroad was quiet. Cass was quiet. I could feel pressure build in my chest and ears. My ribcage vibrated with each pulse as I watched Cassidy take his branch and reach it towards the feet. The high sun and warm rails beneath us goaded us on as we made contact.

We thought the toenails were polished a deep blue but, when Cassidy tried to scrape the color off one of the curled ones with the branch, nothing came off. Rather, the toes uncurled, and we both cussed enough that my Gram would’ve probably given us twenty lashings each if she had heard us.

That was when we ran back to the house and told her everything.

~

“Are you American?” one of the head officers asked Cassidy as we led him to the pair of legs. The officer was overweight, yellow-skinned, and had a double chin that was covered up with a beard. He wasn’t from our town, and he spoke with a drawl akin to molasses melting out of a mouth. My Gram said he talked slow, and it seemed as if he wasn’t aware of the situation he’d found himself in. Like he didn’t know where he was or why he was there. It wasn’t just his speech though; he also furrowed his brow and looked at Cassidy like he couldn’t understand what he was saying. Like he was speaking another language. But Cassidy didn’t have an accent.

“Yeah,” Cassidy replied, “I was born here.”

“Right,” the barrel of an officer said as he scribbled in his notebook.

Cassidy’s parents were refugees from somewhere in Africa, but I can’t remember exactly where. He told me that his parents never really talked about it; they just said they left because of the politics and safety. He didn’t seem to care much, so neither did I.

Gram didn’t like that I hung out with Cass. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him or that she didn’t like that he was different. She said Cass was a troubled kid, and I already had enough trouble of my own. I think she was just concerned to see me bonding with someone who had a hard time, and maybe that meant that I was sad. That was something she couldn’t bear. She was right though, I did have enough troubles of my own, but being with Cass and sharing our distress made it easier for both of us.

You see, Cassidy was the only black kid in eighth grade. In the entire school district, it was just him, his brother, and his sister. There were other minorities, of course. Lots of Mexicans, some Asians, and Eastern European refugees, but he was still the odd man out among all the other odd men. And he felt that in the names they called him—OJ, Tupac, MJ—and many other ways. Classmates made fun of the way his mom dressed and often balanced books on their heads and barked at Cass to help them with the laundry or to help bring in the groceries.

Me, on the other hand, my mom was Chinese and my dad was Caucasian. I came out mostly white, so I didn’t get the same attention. Both my parents were gone from my life when I was only about six years old. My Dad got into some bad things and was put away twenty-five years to life. He is still in there, too. And my mom, well I don’t really know what happened to her, and Gram still avoids the topic. Anyway, Cass and I were both lonely and that’s how we found each other.

~

Cassidy and I watched the cops from my Gram’s back porch while we waited for his mom to come pick him up. They sectioned the area off and took their time gathering evidence and taking pictures of the scene. The yellow-skinned cop from before stopped by and asked us how we were doing. We were fine and asked if they would find out who the person was that lost their legs. He said they would probably never find out and that these things happen to people that don’t have much of a presence or past. And even if they did find the rest of the body, it probably wouldn’t have a name attached to it.

Before he moved on, he took a second glance at Cass, as if he’d never seen him before, and asked him where he was from.

“Here,” Cass said in a short, annoyed burst.

The cop replied with a “huh,” then left with a confused look on his face. After that, more people came and bagged the legs and took them away. It was all relatively quick.

While we sat on the porch, my Gram gathered the shattered remains of the egg salad sandwiches, cookies, and broken ceramic and took them into our house to throw away. After she entered the house I heard her cuss—and she never cussed— so I ran inside to check on her. She had cut herself on the ball of her hand with one of the pieces of ceramic and was hanging it over the kitchen sink as blood dripped down her wrist. She washed it, told me she was fine. To her protest, I picked up the remaining pieces of ceramic and then opened the lid to put them in the trash can. As I did, I saw Gram’s thick blood soaking into the bread and mixing with the yellow eggy paste and green flakes of dill. I don’t know why, but that sight has always stuck with me. I shut the lid, and Cassidy’s mom rang the doorbell.

~

Now, this happened at the tail end of summer. The summer that Nathan Cahill’s mutt got loose and badly bit Emina Jovanović’s face while she was drawing flowers and tracing her hands with sidewalk chalk. The summer that Eddy Ramirez tripped while cliff jumping. He didn’t have the clearance and bounced off the rocks before he splashed into the lake. His body wasn’t found for three days. And three days after that, it became the summer that Nathan Cahill’s mutt was found dead, head beaten in, a bloody shovel left next to it. But soon that summer was going to be over. We could feel it coming, quietly approaching like the nights that were lasting longer and longer.

It was the time of year when it was still hot, but you could feel the wind carrying in an assured coldness, a touch that would soon turn the leaves yellow. Even the sun’s rays would bounce off of you differently, like they were getting lazy. As the cool gasp of wind entered, Cass and I were chasing the fleeing hot breeze like a pair of dogs nipping at motorcycle wheels. And even though the weather was changing, we still hoped that maybe there was time for something good to happen to us, something to stoke the dying heat of summer.

A few days after the legs incident, we were finally able to get back together. Cass rode his bike to my house, and we ate lunch with my Gram—Kraft Mac and Cheese, the spiral kind. After lunch, we were bored and indecisive. We thought about going downtown again. It was a favorite place of ours because it was mostly a strip of dead businesses that hardly anyone visited. There were some thrift stores, an old diner called the Depot Grill, various offices and banks, and one of our favorite haunts.

We called it The Escape. It was an old five story brick building that used to be owned by a newspaper, and it sat next to the rail yard and the movie theater that played art films and sold adult movies. After the paper business moved out, it was empty for several years. A mural of a trout jumping out of a river on the west side of the building flaked away from the baking of the setting sun. It achieved that old rustic aesthetic that people with money found charming. Now it was a fancy restaurant that served wine named after rivers and cooked stuff in duck fat. But the best thing about the place was that it had a fire escape on the outside of the building, just like the New York ones we’d seen in Spider-Man. The second-best thing was that it faced away from the busy roads that ran next to the building, so we could sit up there and not be bothered by anyone.

We’d climb the stairs of the fire escape and reenact scenes from Spider-Man. Cassidy acted like he was Peter Parker, and I like Gwen Stacy. We both liked Gwen more than Mary Jane because she was prettier, and because Gwen fell in love with Peter Parker while MJ fell in love with Spiderman. Most of the time we’d just climb up and down the stairs and remade scenes by replacing Mary Jane with Gwen Stacy. We took turns being Peter and Gwen. We both did a damn good job at portraying them, but Cass was always a better Peter, and I loved being Gwen.

The last time we were at the Escape, we recreated the scene from the movie when Mary Jane kisses Spiderman as he hangs upside down. Cass hung from his legs at the bottom rungs of the fire escape, and I stood on the street in front of him. In that moment, I really felt like Gwen Stacy. I felt the excitement of being in front of a masked man, the allure of a hero, and the joy in knowing that what I fell in love with was not the mask but the person behind it: Peter, Cassidy.

Naturally, I pecked him on the lips. At first, his eyes grew wide and he reached up for the bars with his arms, but then he brought his arms back down and grabbed my head and pecked me back. I smiled like I never had before in my life and Cassidy seemed to do the same, but when he let himself down from the fire escape, he avoided me and went straight to his bike.

“Race you back to my place!” he said. He didn’t look at me the whole race back.

~

I was eager to go back to The Escape, but Cassidy was hesitant about it. He said we’d been down there too much and wanted to do something else. But I knew why he didn’t want to go.

Instead, we decided to hunt for some skipping stones and then head down to the canal. So, we grabbed our backpacks, stuffed them with water bottles, the skipping rocks we had been saving, some snickerdoodles that Gram had baked for us, and went on our way.

Cassidy said we should follow the train tracks instead of our usual route which cut through the pasture that sat in the middle of our neighborhood. So, we left my Gram’s house, trekked up the loose rocks to the tracks, and followed the rails down to the canal.

We often went to the canal to skip rocks. We were good at it, really good at it. There weren’t any rock skipping competitions in our town, but if there were, we knew we would take the top slots. Our biggest competition would be each other. But neither of us really had any money to travel to places that held rock skipping competitions, so we were limited to competing with each other and the few others we ran into at the canal.

As we walked the rails and scanned them for good skipping stones, we ate snickerdoodles and talked about starting a rock skipping business. We could start our own competition at the canal. We would sell stones at the competitions, and when the canal was drained for the winter, go out and collect the rocks and resell them at the next competition.

We were good at finding all the quality stones: the hook shots, old reliables, flying saucers, cigars, big bottoms, and boomerangs. We’d organize them by shape and size, fit of hand, throwing style, and difficulty. It’d help, too, that we would be champions in our own league, so fellow skippers would trust our opinions and rock selection. Skippers Select, we’d call ourselves. An invincible partnership. We were going to make a fortune.

When we got tired of talking about our future venture, we fell silent for a few minutes. The crunch of rocks beneath our feet, the buzz of the power lines that followed the rails, and barking of dogs filled our silence. I looked to Cass and saw him staring down the long track ahead of us. I asked him what he thought the track looked like. He didn’t understand. I told him that when I looked down the tracks it felt like a long ladder that reached to the top of a cliff, the horizon, and at the top of the cliff you could finally climb over and lie down and rest. He told me he didn’t see it that way. He said it was more like an unfurled tongue leading to a mouth, and the mouth was the train, a hollow circle of teeth coming to chew on your bones and swallow you.

I looked to him to offer some sort of comfort, but he just looked down the track.

~

When we got to the canal it was empty. Usually, they didn’t drain the canals until at least the end of September. But for some reason, this year was different. We were disappointed, but we took the opportunity to collect all the good stones that had been skipped into the canal and sunk to the bottom.

We slid down the mossy side, and because there was still a bit of water left, we took off our shoes and socks and put them into our backpacks before we walked barefoot through the ankle high water. Most of the time the canal bed was dry, and we found many good skipping stones. But other times we kicked our way through slimy, moss filled pools and felt for rocks with our toes.

We were gathering quite the haul of skipping stones when we entered a long stretch of ankle high water. Far down the stretch we saw a group of geese and ducks concentrated in the middle of the canal. We continued walking towards them and expected them to fly away, but they didn’t budge. When we were within throwing range, Cass took a big bottom stone and skipped it across water at the birds. The stone didn’t hit them, but it passed close enough that the birds should’ve scattered and flown away. But they just hopped around a bit and focused back in on the spot they were obsessed with.

“Weird,” Cass said to me.

I agreed, and we kept walking through the water, kicking up splashes in an attempt to get the birds to scatter. It wasn’t until we were almost upon them that they finally flew away. They didn’t go far and rested up on the banks of the canal to watch us.

That is when we both stopped dead in our tracks. Right there, where the birds had been so stubborn to leave, was a body. Then the smell hit me. Putrid and sharp. I turned to leave but Cassidy kept moving forward. I wanted to leave him, I really did, but I couldn’t bear to leave him alone, so I followed.

And there he was, a black man missing two legs, an arm, and a hand. He was waterlogged and swollen, like a jug of rancid milk. His eyes were protruding, and his ears were gnawed away. Even though his nose and cheeks had been torn by the beaks of the birds, he looked exactly like Cassidy.

“Cass,” I said in a quick breath.

“I know.”

He kneeled and emptied the dead man’s pockets.

“Cassidy!”

“I just need to know his name,” he said and pulled out a phone that was dripping wet.

“He probably doesn’t even have one,” I said through my plugged nose, “remember?” I tried to remind him of what the yellow skinned police officer told us.

Plugging my nose didn’t work as well as I wanted, so I held my breath. I inhaled through my mouth, and I swear to god, I could taste him. Rotting and hot. Citrus, fish, licorice, and pond scum. That triggered it. I ran, gagging, to the edge of the canal. I puked, and the grainy, doughy, sludge of cookies and mac and cheese splashed into the water that covered my feet.

“Cassidy!” I yelled at him as I kicked my feet in the water, trying to make sure there wasn’t any vomit on them. I climbed up the steep wall of the canal and landed on my hands and knees at the top, struggling to both not breathe and not puke.

~

We got out of there, and I puked a few more times on our way back to my Gram’s house. Cass held me the whole way and carried my backpack. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the last time I would feel so close to him. We returned to my Gram’s. The cops were called and this time they didn’t make us take them to the body. They thought we’d been through enough. Gram put Cassidy’s bike in the back of her station wagon and gave him a ride home. When we got back, she made me Kao Yu—grilled fish. She liked to do that for me, cook Chinese food, since mom wasn’t around anymore to teach me.

I always appreciated her intentions, but that night, with a full fish at the center of the table, I didn’t feel like stripping chunks of flesh off its bones. I sat there quietly. Gram sat there quietly too, waiting for me to come to her. I ate a few dry fried green beans, one of my favorite side dishes, but my stomach struggled to keep them down.

Gram must’ve seen how little I was eating because her maternal instincts kicked in. She picked up her chopsticks and used them to peck at the fish’s head until she found the soft circular part just below the eye and next to the jaw. She used her chopsticks to dig into that vulnerable area and pinched the cheek meat out of its socket. The cheek meat was always the best bit of fish, but when she placed it on my plate, the sticky white and oily coin of meat, along with the smell of the sea, moss, and citrus aromatics, made me retch. I jumped from my chair and ran to the bathroom to expel what little that was in me.

~

It was about a week before Cass and I saw each other again. School would begin the next week, and we would be freshman, but at least we could see each other before that began. He came over one afternoon, and we holed up in my room. We were sorting our skipping stones when Cassidy said he had something to show me.

He told me that he didn’t find an ID on the man, but he did find something. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a small rectangular piece of paper. It was a wallet sized photo. I took it, and this is what I saw:

It was a picture of a backyard. It kind of looked like my backyard if you were standing on the railroad tracks and looking at my Gram’s house. In the picture a tall, large, but not obese man, probably six foot seven, was standing in the middle of a backyard smoking a cigar. He had on jeans and white t-shirt. To the left of the man was a mobility scooter, and directly in front of the man on the lawn was an elderly man, probably in his eighties, on his back trying to sit up or get off his back, clearly in need of help. The man smoking the cigar was staring straight into the lens. The elderly man’s arm was reaching up, blurry and smeared. On the back of the photo was a phone number and a small note that read: I owe you -Maurice.

“We got to call it,” he told me.

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“We gotta. You said he looked just like me.”

He touched my shoulder, and, as apprehensive as I was, I thought this could bring us closer together. “Ok.”

I retrieved the cordless phone from the living room and gave it to Cassidy.

“Put it on speaker,” I told him.

He dialed the number, pushed the speaker button, and we waited. There was a long pause between us as we waited for the lines to connect. Cass stared at the phone, and I stared at him. Finally, the phone responded, “The number you have dialed is not in service. Please hang up and try your call again. This is a recording.”

Cass looked up at me. He had wide, almost bulging eyes, in a lifeless, slack face that turned my stomach. This time, it was I that turned my gaze away from him.

~

For the next few years, I saw the dead man’s face whenever I closed my eyes to sleep. Consequently, I didn’t do much sleeping. Even in waking life I saw it. Whenever I looked at Cass, his face bloated and eyes bulged. I saw his lips get torn off by black and yellow beaks, and the tip of his nose was pecked away, bloody and gaping, soft and pink underneath, like a pomelo or a blood orange being ripped open. And the smell, it always came, rotting and hot, citrus, fish, licorice, and pond scum.

I think that’s part of the reason we grew apart. I loved him, and I couldn’t bear to watch him die anymore.

~

After I graduated, I left the state. It was many years before I returned. I resisted for the longest time, but Gram was there, and my missing her was the lasting tether that lassoed me in. The last time I visited, in October, I walked the railroad tracks just to see how I would feel.

I noticed the details differently. The power lines that buzzed tickled my neck in ways they didn’t before. The hum was grounded, and I could step from sleeper to sleeper and feel the rails shake from my weight, hear them rattle under my stride. The sagebrush that surrounded the rails were more fragrant, and they shook with the fear of quail that scattered at the sound of my boots crunching rocks. And the setting sun made my eyes do funny things. The red rays scattered off the horizon and touched me. I saw rainbows glance off my hands and nose and splinter into my eyes like broken glass in a kaleidoscope.

I walked down the track to the canal. It was empty and mostly dry, and there were perfectly good skipping stones waiting to be picked, but I didn’t dare. Occasionally, there were lumps of debris that made my heart race, but they were only congested areas of rocks and trash. The smell was still there, moist, sandy, and full of the gasses of deteriorating foliage. I didn’t walk alongside the canal for very long before I turned around. The sky was growing dark.

As I made my way back on the tracks, I thought about what Cassidy and I said the railroad looked like. Now, what I saw was different. It may have been the cold evening or the darker setting, but I saw three long black lines stretching for eternity to nothing—two rails and a trail of leaked oil between. They were like lines of ink with a single line between them, a black crayon being scraped across the sleepers and ballast, crude, desolate, and slow. I imagined a slug made of oil inching its way between the rails forever to the end. And at the end, I could make out a blurry figure waiting for me. The rails on my left and right were Cassidy’s two faces, one ripe, one rotting, both watching me walk to his body, waiting for me to see what had become of him. But I walked off the tracks and back to my Gram’s house before I could meet that figure.

~

Sometimes I imagine ramming a railroad spike into my temple. The rusty iron turns my brain orange. I feel the vibrations of all the trains that ever passed over it, all the cargo and people, coal, gravel, logs, and a man in greasy coveralls blowing cigarette smoke through a thick mustache. I burn as the weight of the train turns the rails hot, and I sense the man’s boredom from the long rides. I see what he’s seen, a desert of sprawling bluffs and lonely, anchored buttes, all scattered with sagebrush and black patches from wildfires; a hungry river feasts on basalt as it carves through the land and deepens the narrow, hidden gorges; and a wide-mouthed canyon, toothless and thirsty, waits for rain. The land stretches long and thin and tries to touch the horizon, but it fails. Then, the desert slowly loses color like a polaroid left on the dash of a car, and I feel the rusty spike drive completely through my skull and into wood. My head becomes a rail, and my body is the creosote-soaked sleeper. I let all those trains roll over me, and it just feels good to be close to something.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.