This was written for dVerse where we were asked to include No one left and no one came on the bare platform in a prose piece of 144 words. Yikes! I found incorporating this phrase quite hard.

Death of a Small Town

Our town was a train town. If you didn’t have a car, you came by train. The bus stop was forty miles off the interstate. The airport longer than that.

My lost sister went to the station daily at half past three when the train from DC arrived. She waited, read her Kindle ebook.

She barely managed. Her nursing job hardly paid for rent, food, necessities, kids.

Sometimes I went with her to the station, despite thinking it was hopeless. JD died in Iraq or didn’t want to come home. The military said he was missing. Considering I thought JD was about as substantial as flour in a windstorm, I offered no opinion.

But each day we waited, watched, hoped. No one left and no one came on the bare platform.

Sadness swept over me, watching this town and my sister’s spirit slowly die.

end