i sat in the aisle seat of a darkened train straining to watch the early morning landscape glide through the window. the girl next to me was burrowed under a blanket, and i hesitatingly inclined my head toward her to get a better view of the gray, snowy plains that stretched out for miles. the cars swayed, pushing everyone into and away from each other in a sort-of pattern, but i braced my legs against the floor to keep from upsetting my neighbor’s slumber. something about the color of the early morning sunlight against the late winter landscape made me think of the room i shared with my brother when i was little. curtains thrown open and window thrust up and secured with a ruler, i’d read by moonlight until i fell asleep, book pages rustling when the wind blew in. i’d dream i was chasing after something that was just out of reach. the girl turned toward me under the blanket and i sat back quickly, blushing at the thought of her seeing me so close. soon though her slow, even breathing coaxed me to close my eyes and i realized, right before i slept, that my whole life was a culmination of those dreams, and that i was on a train that was chasing a great thing it would never, ever catch.

“think about it. its like having a 6 year old kid, and you spend all this time setting up his lemonade stand—you even paint the stupid ply-wood orange or whatever color he wants—and train him up in the centuries old art of mixing water, lemons, and sugar, making sure he has the perfect ratios of each and all, and suddenly its 100 degrees outside and there are 30 customers lined up outside his stand, ready to kill for a drink. so there you are, overseeing the child, who’s doing a pretty okay job for being so little, and then *bam.* he forgets to say ‘thank you’ to a customer. so you drag him away from the line, take him up to the garage or something and pull out one of his fingernails with a pair of pliers. but he’s a tough kid. he’s blubbering a little, but trying to maintain composure. you bring him back down to the stand, where the masses are cued up waiting to be sated, and he starts serving again…

…only this time his finger is hurting pretty bad, and so he makes a small miscalculation with the money—like he gives back a quarter where he’s supposed to give back fifteen cents. so its back up to the garage and another fingernail, on the opposite hand, is ripped out. only this time, when you bring him back down, visibly shaking from the pain and the blood, you decided to take over the main part of the operation, the “front-of-house” so to speak, and give him a different job. ‘kid,’ you say, ‘you now have the privilege of squeezing those 50 lemons into that large pitcher there.’ so he goes over and picks up half a lemon and starts to squeeze out the juice, but freezes, grimacing in pain when the first bit runs down to the place where his fingernails used to be. so you drag him back up to the garage and off comes another nail. and so the process goes, until you’ve completely incapacitated the little guy and he just shambles over to a corner and cries silently, cradling his mangled fingers against his chest.”

…was a success. photos of baked goods will shortly follow.

the snow curtailed all my plans for the morning. so i’m making a terribly cute grocery list and after my trek to wally-world i’ll spend my day baking and listening to placebo.