Two-hundred eighty nine kilometers per mile, sixty seconds per minute contracting, reverberating electric against your spine like a million cells exploding. The air presses against your skin, while the metal car sways back and forth and rips balance from beneath your feet. If you stand, you will fall. Metal will scream until all you can hear is your heartbeat, pounding uniform, skittering beats, a hundred even micesteps within your chest. The train is crashing, and time retards; seconds suppress their weight into viscous ticks of a clock. All of them cry. A hundred people in the car break their fingernails into brown-leather seats, but you can't hear them because the metal's screaming too loud.

If you look on their faces, you will see them yelling; moreover, you will see their wounds bleeding into their skin. Not real wounds, rather shadows creeping above their skin. They're dusky, translucent imprints where injury will be, as if fate has already marked them. Hasn't it already? The train screeches against the tracks, and the axle juts up through the bottom metal, cracking through the floor so that it clips a woman. A track tie follows and slices up to impale the right side of the car.

Outside the windows, staring through the foggy marks of hand-prints, you will see the ocean: bruised, dark waters pin back a purple sky and lie stagnant against chaos.