When she turned around she expected to see her friends, the same assholes who invited her out to the rail yard promising a share of whatever booze their cousins had managed to smuggle them. Instead she saw nothing, just powdery white snow falling and the barren bleakness of an industrial relic clinging onto the very edges of modernism.
She'd always been one for the bigger picture, a general thinker as her geography teacher had put it, and the general picture she was getting now was that she'd been stood up. They probably hadn't left their homes since school ended, sitting there in their smug warmth while the cold made her fingers grow number than any alcohol ever could.
At some point she knew she should turn back but another part of her wanted to hide that she'd ever gone out there, that she'd ever been dumb enough to fall for their tricks. As she stood there fuming and plotting, a familiar alarm went off.
She remembered it from her friend's tacky new watch, the purple one she got from Paris last year and hadn't stopped showing off ever since. It sounded reasonably close. Maybe they'd just been hiding and not left her to freeze to death?
Seeing a similar purple watch lying half buried in the snow by a graffiti-smothered carriage, she assumed that they'd been waiting inside the entire time. In her mind she could see them sniggering to each other and swigging away at their promised booze and waiting for her to notice them.
She was always one for the bigger picture, never the small details. Not once did she see the footprints scattered all around her as if several people had fled from something that only moved along the rails. Not once did she think to take the watch and see that it was still on her friend's mutilated wrist.
Not once did she look up and see the broken remains of several people she once knew, tangled in the lines.
She'd always been one for the bigger picture, a general thinker as her geography teacher had put it, and the general picture she was getting now was that she'd been stood up. They probably hadn't left their homes since school ended, sitting there in their smug warmth while the cold made her fingers grow number than any alcohol ever could.
At some point she knew she should turn back but another part of her wanted to hide that she'd ever gone out there, that she'd ever been dumb enough to fall for their tricks. As she stood there fuming and plotting, a familiar alarm went off.
She remembered it from her friend's tacky new watch, the purple one she got from Paris last year and hadn't stopped showing off ever since. It sounded reasonably close. Maybe they'd just been hiding and not left her to freeze to death?
Seeing a similar purple watch lying half buried in the snow by a graffiti-smothered carriage, she assumed that they'd been waiting inside the entire time. In her mind she could see them sniggering to each other and swigging away at their promised booze and waiting for her to notice them.
She was always one for the bigger picture, never the small details. Not once did she see the footprints scattered all around her as if several people had fled from something that only moved along the rails. Not once did she think to take the watch and see that it was still on her friend's mutilated wrist.
Not once did she look up and see the broken remains of several people she once knew, tangled in the lines.
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