Short Story
The Night Train North
20 min read • November 2023 • By Larkspur Words
Ingrid had worked the night desk at Halden Junction for nine years, and she could tell the kind of night it would be by the 11:40. That Friday the 11:40 was twenty minutes late with one passenger still aboard: a girl of maybe nineteen, asleep against the window with a cello case across her knees.
“Last stop for the night,” Ingrid said, gently, the way you speak to deer. The girl woke all at once — the soldier's wakefulness of the young — and said, “I missed my connection, didn't I.” It wasn't a question.
The long platform
The next northbound train left at 5:12. Ingrid, against every regulation, unlocked the waiting room, made tea in the staff kitchen, and sat with the girl — Mira, conservatory-bound, carrying an audition in the cello case and a terror of missing it.
They talked the way strangers can at 2 a.m.: Ingrid about the husband who took the same line south and never wrote, Mira about the teacher who said her tone was “almost.” At 3:30 Mira opened the case and played — one suite, to an empty station, while snow began outside the tall windows.
“Almost, her teacher had said. Almost was a platform, not a verdict. You could board from almost.”
Ingrid wept quietly into her tea and was glad of the dark. When the 5:12 pulled in, on time for once, she pressed her mother's silver brooch into Mira's palm for luck. The girl hugged her — fierce, brief — and was gone up the steps with the cello.
Afterwards
Mira made the audition. Ingrid knows because a postcard arrived in June: three words — I got in — and a programme from a student recital, her name third on the list. It sits above the night desk now, where Ingrid can see it whenever the 11:40 runs late. Some nights, she swears she can still hear the suite in the rafters.
Larkspur Words writes short fiction about cities and the people awake in them. Her collection City of Small Hours was shortlisted for the Harbor Prize.