At the Station

by Jeff Burkhart

She looked out the window, the long thoughts of Pittsburgh fading with the rhythm of the rails. Those thoughts anchored interminably to one place, as if by leaving, she could erase everything: the time spent in that one bedroom apartment, the corner market, the cookbooks and novels that had been her life there. What remained were the long tucked away memories of her parents, a former nun and priest whose love of God could not overpower their love of each other and their yearn to travel. She believed that it was this intensity that denied her the ability to go through a single day without drama, feelings coursing through her with an electric charge that seemed to always be beside her like a traveling companion. That was what drew Dan to her, of course, and eventually, five years later, drove him away. But now all of that was being washed away as she moved west, now just ten miles from her birthplace in Mishawaka, where she hadn’t been since she was two years old and her parents ran away from the cloistered life of Catholic education.

6S

Jeff Burkhart is a musician and writer who lives in idyllic Madison, Wisconsin.