"Just three more days, Dolls, you got this" Dahlia whispered to herself in an exhale trying to keep her small dinner down and not think of the swaying of the cabin like the time she lost it on a small dingy while visiting her sister, Savina in her new port city estate. She shakes her head like it would splash out the memory of the bobbing waves from her head.
She wished she would have accepted the little orange green paper bag of individually wrapped candied gingers when the ticket man suggested a dozen or two. That should have been a sign when switching to this connecting train that the last leg of the journey was going to be the worse part. The only time anyone has freely offers her sweets is when she was being forced a spoon full of medicine.
The cabin lamplight over head kept time with the rhythm of the Breckenridge train as it rattled westward over the notoriously uneven Western Rourke Railway through a patchwork quilt what she was seeing America to be. One hour the windows framed the flashing towers of pines and grasses tall enough to swallow the hollers of rural West Virginia. The snow-pocked mountains appearing to sneak away smaller and smaller then turning to days watching the fleeting glints of ocean and gulf waters transform into humid sticky swamps, black marshes and bayous before drying up to endless brittle dried grass rippling in wind swept valleys then open to into flat nameless plains, finally cracking into parched deserts.
She’d lost track of the state lines hours ago. Texas, no New Mexico, maybe? Or Arizona? The air coming through the narrow windows were dry enough to sting her turquoise eyes as they desperately attempted to return moisture as she attempts to close the opening assaulting her to no avail. Imagining that it must be what the snails feel like in the gardens when her and her sisters would pour salt on them, watching them shrivel, before their mother, Orphianna, could pull them each in by their ears and giving them a lecture on harming gods creatures.
"Every creature deserves to live, Savina, Lovey, Dahli, don’t you dear be caught spoiling good salt to torture the creatures just doing the job God gave them." She would pinch each of their arms 10 times with her bony fingers, making it sting worst than the last. "Do you understand?"
"Yes ma'am" the girls would mumble in unison, heads down shamefully. The youngest, Lovey, crying that she didn’t want to play to begin with. Holding no secrets back "It was Dahli, maw, she wanted to see if sea salt or work salt was be faster."
"No! That’s a lie!" Dahlia would cry getting another 5 pinches from her outburst know full well that she had dragged her sisters out to the garden to be the time counters though one would count faster then the other. It was the cooing and jeering over who's snail was bigger that got Ophianna's attention.
"Why did you tell on me?" Dahlia would ask her sister years later, fighting back tears as she'd labor through betrayal and hurt when Lovely told her mother that she was sneaking to the seamstress to learn to how to make dresses instead of going to school. She spend days over weeks working on a dress for her mother that she never got to finish. She was whooped and decided she wouldn’t bother explaining what she was doing from spite. Her mom going on instead about her age and men wanting to steal her as the reason for her anger more than anything. She'd lecture Dahlia on safety around strangers for hours after, over and over again while holding her necklace. Sometimes praying for Dahlia with the flowering pendant it in her palms, the 9 garnets and silver metal holdings pressing hard enough to indent into her skin afterwards. The same necklace she would take off on Dahlia's 21st birthday and clasp around Dahlia's neck, making her swear to never remove it. "This has protected our family and keep you safe, Dahli. It'll keep me with you went you marry off and have babies of our own. Don’t lose it. Okay baby?"
Dahlia tried to hold fast to the picture of her mother’s long dark lashes lifting to show those big loving amber eyes, her thick brunette curls falling around freckled cheeks as she laughed and pulled Dahlia close. “My baby is so curious!” she’d say, warmth in her voice enough to make Dahlia forget the world outside their little house and yard. But before Dahlia could stay in that memory, the greys spread through her mother’s hair far too soon, shedding in clumps that seemed to pile in the corners no matter how often Dahlia swept them. The dizzy spells grew worse, the coughing fits frequent and sharp, until blood stained pillows and handkerchiefs and dinner napkins, small red signatures of an illness that consumed her. Her younger sisters had already gone north when the sickness took hold, folded into tidy lives with husbands and children. Despite being the eldest, she was unmarried and had no where else to go but to stay and tend to their sick mother.
The last four years following her 21st birthday had been swallowed whole by that sickness. The house felt like it was closing tighter with every echo of her mother’s lungs eating themself. The doctors would offered this pill and that concotion but shook their heads in the end, muttering nothing more to be done. When the end came, the community came together to put her to rest but Dahlia wouldn’t see any of that rest. Harassed by doctors and banks demanding payment for her mothers debts which she knew nothing about nor could possibly pay back, she wouldn't have a moment to grieve as her home and anythign of value would be taken for repayment. With mother's necklace that she'd hid away and the two suitcases of belongings to her name, she would be forced from her childhood home and into her cousin's cramped house.
It was her uncle who introduced her to Ezra Grafton in an attempt to unburden his house of her or any of his 5 daughters. Ezra was much older than her, maybe thirty-five or forty. A very charming businessman who seemed to spend all his life traveling. He had a contagious smile that made her feel like he knew her, who could seemingly read her mind and finish her sentences. In the short time they met, he had been… perfect. Like he was a lighthouse drawing her out of the darkness she was floating through. He'd leave after a week but letters came after his departure, polite, attentive, always the right thing written at the right time. Then came the offer: a place in his winter home in Colorado. Not alone in a house of extended family on a cold floor, he’d said. With house staff, a warm bed, and everything she could want. A place where she could belong again and a husband to return to her come spring if she'd have him. And with nothing left to anchor her, she slipped the engraved silver engagement band he’d mailed her onto her finger, fastened her mother’s necklace at her throat, tucked away the little money she had hidden into her blouse, and downsized to a single suitcase. The one-way train ticket to the mining town, Breckenridge Colorado, that he'd sent laid folded inside her pocketbook.
Somewhere ahead waited a man she hardly knew that seemed to be everything she could ever want but never found in the suiters of West Virginia. A man that she had promised herself to and the thought made her uncomfortable for some reason. When she thought about it too long, her chest would pound hard up into her throat making her want to retch. Her mother would have brushed her hair and told her it was just the jitters, the way Dahlia watched her do with Savina and Lovely when it was each their time to leave to their new families. Kissing and hugging them like she knew it was going to be the last time she'd see them.
The train's cabin rattled hard, jostling her almost out of her seat breaking her from the near sleep that's been avoiding her for weeks. She wrapped her fingers around the same flowering pendant. The pendant was cool and still on her chest with just enough weight that it felt almost like a hug, like for a moment, that she wasn't alone on this musty train. In this suffocatingly hot cabin. In this giant lifeless desert. On a one way trip to a town she doesnt think she could even belong in. She had never been so far from home or so alone for that matter.
Tears pull in her lashes as she opens them and sees the cabin lamp has burn out with no trace of the smoldering wick lingering, it must has burnt out hours ago. "Goodness… I must be more tired than I thought…" Dahlia mumbles to herself, realizing she'd fallen asleep. "It must be after midnight." She peers into the night sky for some sort of familiar confirmation but even the sky is foreign here.
Instead she kept her eyes on the horizon, lit bright by the swollen moon. Black and grey shadows dragged themselves across the cabin’s wood as the light poured over the pale sands, jumping mesa tops and slipping between boulders, turning the saguaros into long-armed, hatless cowboys pacing the train. She watched the moon wedge itself in a canyon passage, squeezed down low under an arch of stone like an giant eye with a dusty orange iris. If she was the superstitious kind, she would’ve dropped her gaze from the contest, but instead she sat still and let the thought chew at her that the desert was looking right back. Watching her in this little wooden box sneaking past its all-knowing eye under the cover of night, as if even the freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks were constellations lit up for it to follow.
The cabin rocked hard, jolting her forward, and for a heartbeat, she thought the eye had blinked. She snapped her eyes closed, leaning her head back against the seat - chest tightening in a suppressed gasp. Just light tricks, she rationalized, clutching the pendant hard against her chest the way her mother did. The metal was oddly cool despite the heat. Just cactus shadows and her own 'restless imaginings' she could hear her mother say as she opened her eyes to look back at the moon. The moon didn’t look away, instead she swore it was narrowing, as if it meant to lean in through the window and snatch away her with the long fingery cactus shadows that invited their way across the cabin. Suddenly, the silhouette of dead branches screech across her window - her breath hitched sharp, her hands flying to the curtain, yanking it shut before the desert could get any closer.
Dahlia felt like that little girl again for a moment squeezing her eyes tight, as if the dark inside her lids were a blanket to hide her head under. She wished she could run to her mother like she had when she was a girl. Afraid of the dark after telling her sisters stories of wendigos and wampus cats creeping in the treelines of the yard. Only to scare herself in the end. She could feel her pulse hammer through her pendant as she tried to steady nerves, missing the way her mother’s voice could always make those things in her mind retreat.
This trip had been long enough for strangeness to find her at multiple points including this moon. More than once she caught men, women, even children watching her as if she were something pulled from a traveling show's curiosity musuem. A human frog, she thought bitterly. Their eyes followed her in a way that made her want to run if not for the fear that they would break out onto all fours and hunt after her like the old skinwalker stories. She learned to keep her eyes diverted, face to the window, to hold her breath until they lost interest, though the feeling of their gaze lingered heavily. Just like how she felt at the moment.
