Trainyard,
A short story by Tom Kelly.
I dream often,
But last night was no ordinary dream.
What I saw wasn't imagination,
Nor the drifting fragments of sleep.
It was a walk through the impossible.
The setting was a rail yard.
Siding scattered,
Lanterns swung,
And men with tools worked the hard grind of years gone by.
I wasn't just standing there,
I was seeing through a lens bolted to the front of a slow-moving train that inched through the yard.
And this lens wasn't human.
It didn't record,
It revealed.
It peeled the world apart like thin paper shims of light and process.
A man lifted a hammer to strike a spike,
And I didn't just see the blow,
I saw the strike ripple through air and metal,
Detail unfolding in fractals.
A train wheel shifted inches and it became cathedral-like,
An entire geometry of sound and weight.
Even the sway of a lantern as someone walked became vast,
Multi-dimensional,
And psychedelic without the drugs.
Dreamborn,
But in a sense more real than anything I've seen before.
At the center of this dream stood a figure,
An engineer,
Steady-handed,
Practical,
And shaped by the logic of steel and structure.
He smiled like a creator,
Guiding me through the yard as though showing me a secret film.
But he wasn't bound by the rules of engineering,
He was a master of imagery,
Directing something far beyond proof or logic.
As the camera panned further with me behind it,
The focus shifting,
Threads linked the entire moment into small,
Useful pieces,
But kept the vision broad in a way that is hard to describe.
It's like the universe was unfolding in all its intricate glory before my eyes.
Then the rail yard dissolved,
The engineer became a chef,
A cast-iron pan sizzled,
Eggs cracking open,
A wooden spatula working with impossible finesse.
What should have been a simple breakfast became alchemy.
The egg-white rose transformed,
Fluffed into something like meringue,
Impossible and beautiful.
The act was ordinary and extraordinary all at once,
The kind of magic you could only see when the lens widened beyond the human frame.
I was witnessing all of the in-between things that are normally never seen,
And the viewing was pristine and precise.
Nothing was abstract or left to question,
But instead shone with impossible detail.
I woke shaken,
But certain.
This wasn't a dream to be forgotten.
It was an initiation,
Proof that the ordinary world holds hidden layers,
That the worker with his lantern is more than a man in the dark,
And that an egg is more than food.
That awe doesn't need a special introduction or a sacrament,
It's already here.
In the hum of trains,
In the crack of shells,
In the quiet details,
No human lens understands it can hold.
The world waits to be torn open,
And if you let yourself see,
It will.
Thank you for listening.
