We have been in this iridescent train carriage for God-knows how long, as my mother would say. Desert swathes around us and there is no train track, no one has questioned this.
I bought my ticket last week, fiddling with it and getting caught by its sharp corners when I wasn’t looking. I still have small cuts from deliberating on whether to join Louis, rotating the sharply cut train ticket in my hands, the imprint of a gold sun speaking for itself.
I move through the people in the carriage slowly- like I’m dragging my feet through mud, unable to ever gain momentum, and find the bar. Thank Christ. Mother would say that too- but I won’t see her again so best not dwell on that.
It is clad in small square mirrors, like a disco ball that has been flattened and arranged into a rectangle that serves luminescent alcohol.
“Rainbow road?” the bartender says without looking up.
I look over the counter and see he is pretending to polish a glass. No one is questioning this either, no one is questioning anything. And neither will I.
“Yes.”
Soon enough a cocktail glass, the colour of a soap bubble, arrives in front of me. The liquid inside has the surface that petrol does in the sunlight- a dark rainbow.
Rainbow road I guess, huh.
I slick it down my throat, and suddenly the carriage and the strange people who are laughing into air makes sense and yet no sense at all.
I am delighted, and ready to stay. I get down from the tall bar stool and decide to find Louis, decide to give in.
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