Rail Track

Five year old Alice was playing with her Barbie Dolls in Fayetteville, Baldwin, in the later stages of dusk. The shadows which sunset brought stretched across the lawn and the colours of the sky were reflected on the drops of water, which were sprinkled across the lawn. Even though her parents were a quarter mile away in the chicken houses and her sister was out riding her bike, she had the very strong feeling that someone was watching her, and that whoever it was, was very close by. She looked up to see a face in the front window. 

Not really knowing what she was doing and working purely on intuition as most children do. she put her dolls on the house porch and went into the house to investigate. They lived in a small area, which was populated by few people, and so when they were away at the chicken house or somewhere nearby, they rarely kept the doors locked. Upon opening the door to what would be the hallway and getting a clear view into her sister's room, she saw a figure dressed in period clothing. He was tall, but she was not near enough to see any of his features. She was so scared that she ran out of the house and to where her parents were, leaving the door wide open. Her parents were so concerned to see her burst into the scene, panting for breath and white faced, that they drove all the way back with her to find that there was no one in the house. All that was left were the scattered Barbie dolls which lay at the entrance of the house. About seven years later, Alice sat in one of her high  school classrooms and looked out the window. Bored, she sat back in her seat and looked at the book in front of her. Only having just bought it that day, despite the fact that she had been taking the subject for the past four months, she flipped through it, looking at the pictures. The teacher's voice did not seem to exist in her reality.

History was not exactly the most stimulating subject in the world. She flipped through the book a little slower, hoping that maybe, looking at the pictures more carefully would make time go by even faster. She stopped somewhere in the middle of the textbook and looked at the picture of the man who wore the exact same thing she had seen on the strange figure she had seen when she was eight.  She went to her local library the same day after finding out that the outfit was one which would belong to a rail worker from the Jesse James days. She went immediately to the periodical, which told stories of the town's history and gave timelines of everything that had ever happened there. She had taken note of the period of time from which the man had come by reading the section in her textbook.

Her heart stopped when she read the words on the page. A railroad had run directly through the land, which her house was built on. It ran through her bedroom and her sister's room where she had seen the figure. She slammed the huge book shut, causing the thick layer of dust to take to the air. Some people turned around at the thudding sound it made and shushed her angrily before returning to whatever it was that they had been reading. She did not care. She had found out what she needed to know and there was no reason to stay there any longer. She left the library, the recently resurrected ghost of her past dying to her once again.