Pulp and Paper (Short Story‪)‬

Trinty Atlantic Train 109 shimmied through western Pennsylvania, curving north around Broadband Mountain, south around Hitch Mine, following a descending range of unexploded hills toward the Gulch. It moved cautiously, in fits and starts, as if it didn't trust the world beyond its headlights. On Train Trestle Bridge, the 109 attracted the attention at a fisherman a few hundred feet below, wending a spinner through foaming currents. "She was moving kind of herky-jerky," he said. " She stopped, started, stopped again. You could hear noises--shouting. Sound carries pretty good right there, with the rock on both sides. Anyway, she stayed put six or seven casts, then hissed. You had the sense she was packing it in for the night, right there on the Sticks. That proberly would've been best, considering." Eventually, though, the train lurched forward again and seemed to find a purpose. It churned past Rawls Point, through the villages of St. George and Desmond. It glided steadily across Gambler's Ridge on the outskirts of town. A time-lapse photo taken shortly before midnight by an amatur photograpgher in the valley shows the red lights above the lanker cars as a solid, unwarering line, something you could hang clothing on or feed a signal through. The train plunged into Cumberland Forest, agitating a lunnel formed by overhanging beech and sugar maple trees, and, finally, rolled into Slab, crossing the corporation limits at an undemarcated location. City maps show the tracks intersecting the straight-dedged eastern border, drawn with ruler and fountain pen by P. Dickson, a surveyor in the office of James Braun & Sons, in 1889, which, as some would later point out--as if it explained something was the year of the Johnstown flood.