Road to Hell

The small town station is deserted as you step away from the counter where the bespectacled clerk disinterestedly informs you that you will have to wait another two hours for your train. Wondering what you are going to do for the next two hours, you buy cigarettes and a cup of coffee from a stall that sells local magazines too. You take a sip of the lukewarm liquid which has traces of coffee. Lighting the cigarette, you walk the length of the platform, passing the station master’s cabin from which the clatter of the typewriter breaks the monotony of the mid-morning silence that has descended on this station. A strange sense of emptiness envelopes the place as you reach the end, you turn to see a boy in his loincloth taking a bath from the tap that’s fixed to a tiled wall that comes up to two feet. He laughs and asks for a cigarette, which you ignore. Walking back, you throw the coffee cup in a trash can and crush out the cigarette and put on the Walkman and this song comes on, eerily befitting the emptiness of this place. Lying down on a stone bench, your eyes blankly staring at the old, dirty but still functioning ceiling fan. If ever there was a portal that transported you to a different dimension, this was the place. And if they ever played any song as you boarded the craft, this was it.