Andrea Fischer

What Carries Us

We get on the train and sit down in the tiny compartment.  We have chocolates and bread and cheese and just enough space. We have cigarettes and then not enough space.  There is so much space outside.  There will never be enough space.

We are a concrete blur -- a modest train with lowered shades passing under bridges gathering splinters of light through blinds -- the only directions we have pointing north, pointing towards what is already carrying us away.

I take a picture of you and your reflection in the train window as night falls.  The smoke from your cigarette rises up from both the real you and the ghost you in the window.  We cross into Croatia, we cross into Poland.  We are not so much finding our way, as marking our way, flinging aside buoys of our history as we try to run away from the end of us.

Bio: Andrea is a writer whose work has previously appeared in Granta (online), Boston Literary Review, and Eunoia Review, among others.  She has had the same travel backpack for almost twenty years now and hopes to use it for another twenty