2025-12-11 Journal Entry

11:00AM

The huge steel beasts moved slowly on the land. At times they cried out but mostly silent they went with little more than the chunk of metal over rough earth.

The beasts were beasts of labor, laying upon their backs the product of the self-same earth they rode. The beasts moved by the earth too, coal plumes huffing from steel snouts. They had domesticated men some years ago for this purpose, men to feed them and build paths over the land for them.

5:00PM

He wondered for a moment what else was in the cargo hold. Coal, for certain, and whatever mystery was held in the shipping containers mounted on the far side. It held him too and the others. It would carry the others to the places they themselves needed to see – Hoit to the library and the old pub, Marry to the sea, the boys hopefully to see their mother’s grave. What the train carried then was the stories, the way home. It mattered not how the beasts seemed, he determined, for they carried the seeds of home. And whatever pain it carried was dead weight, was fuel to be burned off. He decided that it was truly Marry who was the fool, for he was the man alone by his choosing. He is dead to the world, for if he did live then his pain would become the sky and his love the earth. Pain did not make him. Love would make him, would he let it.