unpublished story: Train

My mother always told me do not fall halfway asleep on a train holding a part of you you cannot control. She has lived for a long time. Now she lives apart from my father and arranges furniture and decorative fruit in her own apartment. When I was nine she took away a train-set my father had bought me and disassembled it. Where is your father now, she said, and shook me. She apologized. This is before she asked me whether I had sexual thoughts. We snapped the railroad back together and used it. She and my father had a dinner party that night. My parents were actors. I am a very good doctor. I do not believe in acting. When I was fifteen my mother kissed me in the backseat of a moving car. She didn't take it too far beyond that. I remember the unimpeachable age of my mother. She said that she felt like a teenager again.