Eesa stared in silence.

The little brightly colored birds 

gazed up at her in joyful appreciation 

for the bits of bread she absently broke off 

to distribute among them. 

Looking down from the step where 

she slouched, she watched them 

give knowing looks to each other

from time to time, as if she wasn't

really there, as if possessed by some

arcane knowledge known only to them.

All she’d ever known were peaceful

sleepy little towns spread distantly apart,

each with its guilds and services,

each with trim park-like acreages,

sprawling gingerbread homesteads

and colorful gardens, small barns and

outbuildings inhabited by pigs, dairy

cow herds, sheep and chickens.

Occasionally, you’d see sleepy dogs or

cats on the wrap-around porches, snoozing

beneath the unchanging hazy sun.

Each night, at sunset, clouds would begin to lower,

shrouding everything with a soaking mist that watered

the gardens and filled the watering troughs, painting

the landscape a brilliant green.

The cereal and grazing fields surrounded

each community, which were in turn

surrounded by great walls inset with

great tall strong steel doors, that only

opened and closed for the trains

that brought the mail, migrating guilders or

visiting relatives of same, ferrying craft items,

plain goods, produce and hand-built furniture 

the distant towns were unable to make for themselves.

In all memory, the trains never carried the simply curious…

There was no need really, no matter how far you would

travel, the towns would always be much the same, 

as similar as the people that populated them.

Besides, trains traveled only by night through the

in between through the starless darkness of mist fall.

To look out the window, was to see

only your own reflection, for in the space

between the settlements was only darkness.

To walk out those great doors, only took the

pressing of a secret panel hidden in the frame,

the location, a secret known to every engineer

and engineer’s son, but no one else

would even consider asking of it, or had

ever done so in recorded memory.

Everyone knew the stories

on the ancient CD's from the library,

how the former world had faded

in the ashes of destruction-how

their founders had survived in dark

caverns for the years of scant warm 

seasons, more often buried by moaning

blinding blizzards of snow and ash

under the endless darkness of

roiling storm clouds and cold.

When the clouds finally dissipated for good,

things settled into the familiar pattern of sunny days

and every evening’s misting times that filled the dark,

the accepted norms of here and now.

The survivors, climbing out of their warrens, found

a world uniformly and strangely alien, endlessly and

cloyingly covered by thickets and forests of green.

They struggled then, to build this world, 

that Eesa, the engineer’s girl, inhabited,

investing a century and half of toil-not just to

build settlements and track-not merely to select 

and bring to life selected machines

and animals, but to repel the strange,

frightening things that now lived in the spaces

between-alive, but unseen, but sometimes heard

in the cars and cabs of the trains as they hurtled

through the dark beyond the great doors,

as the trains rolled from light to distant light.

Trackmen and engineers sometimes whispered

of those unsettling sounds in the great trees

towering beside the rail beds when maintenance 

was scheduled, but no one lingered long, even in

the day or went out the great doors out of curiosity

in misting time to the in between, when the safety

of home and hearth awaited ahead or behind.

But one late evening, Eesa,

who was to be an engineer someday,

as her father and brother before her, 

having nursed her curiosity for too long,

came to the great doors, and pushing

the hidden panel swinging them outward,

stepped into the realm between, into

the dark walking down the tracks.

Her father found her as he slowed his train

for the great doors, his engine’s light

revealing her, glaze-eyed and shaking,

beside the great doors, scared to the skin,

as dawn swept upward the wispy remnants

of this night's misting time.

Sitting here today, she ached all over.

There were bruises shaped like circles

of various sizes across her upper arms and back.

She had a furtive vacant look about her,

lost in a hazy daydream about glowing goats

a drifting talking star, about dust

that would stir and whirl, assuming

suggestive and disturbing shapes imbued

with a sense of hostility, so profound,

she knew she could never explain it,

nor could she ever again board a train

for that ride through the darkness between

after the dusk and the falling of misting time.

As she eyed the looks of cool

intelligence on the brightly

colored birds feeding at her feet. 

She shook her head and

shuddered in the knowledge

of where they went at dark. 

Looking at the distant wall,

sighed, and looked down again, 

assessing the reality she was a prisoner,

and would be forever trapped

between the lights in misting time.