"Well shit, that didn't work," the conductor said.

He walked around the wreckage, pulling out passengers. Women, mostly. The men waved off his advances.

One gloriously attired woman emerged from a smoldering welt of torn metal as though she were departing at Poughkeepsie. Nary a scratch or displaced hat-feather.

"You are the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on," the conductor thought. What he said was, "Ma'am."

The day was still high above them, children kicking rocks along the tracks. The conductor scratched under his hat and wondered, well what the hell now?

A man sitting in the...

"Grandpop's teeth didn't look like that."

"How do you know?"

"Because mom always said you got his teeth. Do your teeth look like that?"

"Maybe after they'd been in the ground for fifty years."

"Not even. Look at the length of them."

"No, teeth keep growing after you die."

"That's nails, dummy. And they have to be attached still. You think teeth keep growing if they're just loose like this?"

"Who can say?"

"You know who would know?"

"Yeah, but she can't exactly tell us, now can she?"

"Well, she'd know for sure."

"Grandma's probably the one who did it...

His dive, performed in front of the small, half-drunk dinner party, was perfect in his mind. He'd had a few martinis at dinner, his wife looking at him strangely over her chardonnay. But he was on a roll that night. And Joyce had come with that husband of hers, Jerry, and had shot him her own looks as he went on about this and that. Sometimes the words came spilling out in a beautiful procession. Tonight, he was on.

Then the whole group wandered out to the backyard after he had told them he was going to perform the dive...

An old sepia photo can be a bullet. It can tear through the lineup of neurons, neatly lined up like socks on a bed. It can make you aware that you are your latest incarnation. That you have been here before.

A mother and her child. Doesn't that child look familiar? Who remembers his own birth? Especially when it was 70 years ago? Today I am 27. I have been 27 many times now, projecting myself a year into the future so that I could live as 27 for a year, then my past self projecting himself a year into...

This sludgy finger of water curling around the land. A mucky smile that hides whatever you slip inside of it. The lake never tells.

So I'm pleased you chose this place to meet, my dear. You have solved a riddle I've kept hidden behind my own smile. Come closer for a moment so I can see your face in the moon. Let's walk down to the water's edge and peer deep into eternity.

I didn't want to meet you tonight. My plan was as unsettled as a river. But you pinched it off into something definable, and I feel calmer...

Pointing skyward, his finger aflame.

"Can you come here a minute?"

Trying to catch the attention of surf but drawing only seagulls, which landed on his fingertip and looked around stupidly in the low sky of November.

My whole life is a finger on fire, and wrong things coming to help. A man wearing a hat. Some flotsam. A ship in the dead of night, a drunken captain