Daydream
on a Season’s Ticket
Flash Fiction Story
by James Walton
“My name is Dan. We cannot help you.”
He is slightly stooped, like a man who has carried a barrel on his shoulders,
and his right eye is turned or lazy, but realigns behind his thick black rimmed
glasses when he finishes speaking from the Lost Property window. I have lost my
phone and I am in a train station, sitting opposite a large 50’s type mural of
a family on a picnic, all laughing, and waving back to a conductor who is
smiling as the train leaves them behind.
An elderly lady sits next to me, a
couple of bench seat spaces away. She is eating hot chips from a rolled
newspaper, and I can smell the vinegar. They are thick and sort of soppy, the
kind you can remember the taste of, and the extra salt that comes when you lick
your fingers. I cannot help myself and ask if I could have one? She is precise
and adamant. “No.”
The mural catches my gaze as the
children in it have departed and the parents are no longer grinning and are
looking about, alarmed. When, I turn back to look at her, she is gone, and
three sea gulls are squabbling over half a chip, among them, one missing a leg,
hops into flight, crashing into the frozen picnic and falls on to the rails,
where it flops back to the wall, sitting as though lapsing in a lounge.
I am contemplating that I have not seen
a newspaper in a very long time when Dan approaches me with a phone and places
it in my lap. It is not mine. I consider telling him for the sake of
conversation and to see if his ocular adjustment will occur again, but the
one-legged gull is now part of the mural, caught in flight, taking off with a
sandwich crust while a boy child laughs, and a girl chases it mid step, all the
while laughing with her brother, as though she is lifted hanging on to a kite. The
parents are no longer present, and an older woman, a grandmother, sits on the
rug reading a spread-out broadsheet.
A woman in a railway uniform taps me on
the shoulder. “You should answer that.” The phone is ringing, the ring tone is Smoke
on the Water. I turn around and see a name JACINTA on her top pocket, hand
embroidery in perfect pre modern script. I begin to tell her, “I don’t own it,
it can go to voice …” when I realize she is the same smiling conductor from the
grand mural. Looking back to it in sudden apprehension, she is no longer there,
and when I turnabout she is no longer behind me either. As the phone pings I am
perplexed as I recall being on a regional train, the teak and huon pine shining
in waxed care, and the countryside another State, the driver tooting as we slowed
to enter a small-town platform.
My thumb is bleeding, the gull ‘s beak
tinged with my colour, it sidles down from my cross-legged sit, jumping to
where the children break up a sandwich for it. The parents offer me a sling
stopped beer; the small bottle’s pull-down sealer opened for me. The mother
wears a lemon cashmere sweater, the father a heavy knit sepia cardigan. I see
the train slowly pulling away and a hand waving farewell from the front
carriage. In the near distance a figure begins to emerge, and she carries a
cane basket, and has The Argus tucked under an armpit. She mouths a
glancing hello to me, some acquaintance of the family she does not know, to
whom some politeness is required.
My focus is drawn to my shoes which are
now set out in rich burgundy small tiles. Movement is becoming a heavy
lethargy. Still, I have enough energy to squeeze a finger to the message
button, and to look out across the rails to where I see a family watching me, a
woman with a toddler on her hip, a man standing with a larger infant, each of
them holding their burden close with exhaustion. An older woman hands around
fish and chips, snapping the larger chips in two for the children, before
passing them to the wanting hands, opening and closing in anticipation. A
regret hangs between us, under the lull I feel, a gentle wash of an artist’s
cleaning sponge. My eyes are hardening, and I am becoming a pose within
ceramics. The phone responds, “My name is Dan, we cannot help you”, as the last
light of the elongated summer evening fades.
James Walton is published in many
anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He has been shortlisted for the ACU
National Poetry Prize, the MPU International Poetry Prize, The James Tate
Prize, and the Ada Cambridge Prize. Five collections of his poetry have been
published. He was nominated for ‘The Best of the Net’ 2019, and was a Pushcart
Prize 2021 nominee. He is a winner of the Raw Art Review Chapbook Prize. His
fifth poetry collection, Snail Mail Cursive, was published by Ginninderra
Press in January 2023. He now resides in Wonthaggi, Australia, in an Edwardian
house which was once a small maternity hospital.
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