The Mystic Railroad Baker.Pdf
The Mystic Railroad by Jacqueline Curry/443-810-9559 Chapter One I don’t believe I ever really had a proper name, a real name, like others do, stamped in ink on a birth certificate; but folks, that is some of the hoboes and the homeless I tramp around with and hop trains with, started calling me Sidney, which rhymes with kidney, an apt name for me, since like the function of that particular organ, I am a vessel which filters out the poison all around me. Around my neck, burnt the color of brick from baking in the sun, hangs on a shoe- string, a chunk of iron, an old railroad spike I found, in the shape of an elongated teardrop. Sometimes I wear a bandanna, too, for protecting my mouth and nose from dust, coal silt, pollen, and fumes. Frequently, traveling through America, from the West Coast of California to the East Coast of Maine, and visiting numerous states in between, riding in boxcars, I fall into trances where the grit and mud and dirt and body odor and aching gnaw of hunger in my mostly empty belly, the reality of my present world, falls away, and I am swaddled in euphoria, nearly catatonic with bliss, heralded with the singing of angels or celestials, I’m never sure which. Conversely, with my eyes rolling back and flickering wildly in my head, I see the apocalypse, mass human destruction, tidal waves, earthquakes, famine, and war. But my body glows with an unquenchable fervor, knowing that I was sent to this troubled world to help, to change things for the better.
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