Feeble As Frail: Part 1

August 1927.

All eyes turned towards the woman struggling up the center of the train car, and Arthur knew that everyone else must have noticed the same strangeness about her that he had. Though it was a windy day, it was still summer and thus was unusual to see a woman so completely covered. Was there some other reason? Dark glasses obscured her eyes and the kerchief she’d wrapped around her hair also covered her mouth. She wore a long overcoat with stockinged feet and flat shoes sticking out beneath. In one gloved hand she held a white cane and in the other a hard shelled suitcase. A large combination lock secured the suitcase and the two clanked together with every movement.

The whistle blew and white billows of steam rolled past the windows. As the train lurched, so did the woman. The items she carried made it difficult for her to steady herself. Unwilling to release either the cane or the suitcase, she began to topple. Arthur realized that her luggage was much too heavy for her to carry safely.

He stood and went for her. People moved out of his way, as they often did. He was a tall and broad man with a dark beard. He would’ve rather been clean shaven, but the hair was necessary to hide his scars. As intimidating as he may have looked now, he could’ve cast himself as an even more unsettling character if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t. One of the people moving away from Arthur bumped the woman. She fought to hold onto the case, letting the cane roll a few feet down the aisle.

This made Arthur pause for the smallest fraction of a second. What was so important in that suitcase that she’d risk breaking her neck over it? Was it dangerous in any way? Was he getting himself into yet another mess he’d be better off avoiding? He dismissed these thoughts as quickly as they came to him. There had to be a thousand benign explanations for her behavior.

Arthur steadied her with an arm around her shoulder. Her foot faltered and fell out of its shoe. Arthur saw a bare toe sticking through a hole. There you go, dimwit, he thought. She’s just poor, like you. Clearly, the suitcase was important because the less you have, the harder you fight to keep it.

“Thank you.” said the woman. “I haven’t had much help lately.”

Her voice was younger than Arthur had expected, but also much more dour. Those few words carried a note of permanent, subterranean sadness. And though she wasn’t hostile at that moment, Arthur sensed deep running veins of anger that were ready to burst should the moment arise. Then again, he always said things like this and people usually brushed him off. It was a sad fact that if you had a childhood like his, you often saw malice where there wasn’t any. Hell, that’s what got him into the mess he was on his way to fix now.

“Would you like to sit?” said Arthur, turning her to the seat he had just vacated.

“Are there any empty spots?”

“Yes, right here.”

He kept a gentle touch on her arm as he guided her down to the bench. He noticed that as her overcoat shifted around her, there was buldge in one of its pockets. The way the fabric swayed implied the object inside was heavy. Once the woman was seated, she pulled the suitcase between her legs, exhaling as she leaned back.

An older couple sat in the bench behind her. They were arguing, or to be more accurate, the man was griping about money while the woman shrunk into herself. He had a big face like a partly deflated pink balloon. Emboldened by his wife’s silence, his volume escalated sufficiently to earn him nasty looks from some of the other travelers. Now that the blind woman had taken her place, a new thing had emerged to capture the carriage’s attention.

“Are you still here?” said the blind woman.

“Yes, I’m standing right behind you. Would you like your space?”

“Oh it doesn’t matter. Who am I to chase away a Samaritan? Who am I at all, really?” She extended a gloved hand in the direction from which she’d heard Arthur’s voice. “I’m Bonnie, if you’d like to place a name to your good deeds for the day.”

Arthur got the slight sense that she might be mocking him, but he wasn’t sure. When he took her gloved hand, it felt like it was made of little more than bones. It startled him when she stroked the back of his own hand. There were raised marks there. She traced them with the tip of that thumb and made out the shape, a trio of triangles knotted together. She whispered something to herself which Arthur didn’t catch.

“I’m sorry?” he said.

“Don’t worry.” said Bonnie. “I’m sure you’d rather I not discuss it amongst all these people.”

She released his hand.

“I’m Arthur, by the way.”

The man behind behind them was cursing now. His monologue seemed to know no boundaries. Arthur, never one to invite himself to a fight, didn’t even look back. Bonnie shifted in her seat and pinched her nose through the scarf. When she let it go, a little blood stain had appeared on the fabric. She slipped a hand into the pocket of her overcoat. It was the one with the heavy object.

“Arthur means courageous.” she said. “Are you courageous?”

“I guess that isn’t for me to decide.”

“That’s a very good answer. You are certainly courteous, but I don’t know about courageous. Why don’t you say something to that man back there?”

Arthur paused and then said, “It’s not really my place.”

“That’s convenient.”

That ended the conversation. Arthur wasn’t really interested in talking to her anymore. He wasn’t really a shy and self-effacing man, but he also had little interest inserting himself into other people’s troubles. Again, he remarked in his thoughts about how this behavior was an occasional source of criticism, and again he had to admit that he had reason to turn a skeptical eye to his fellow humans. One never knew what oddities might be lurking beneath otherwise normal looking conflicts. That seemed to be just as true of his efforts to assist a poor blind woman as it probably would be for the spatting couple behind them. If Bonnie didn’t understand that, then she and her strange suitcase could go to Hell.

The train would be pulling into his destination in the next few minutes anyway. The smell of potato chips from the factory in town was confirmation of that. The engine slowed. Arthur made his way to the end of the car without speaking to Bonnie. She called after him anyway.

“Good bye, courteous Arthur.”

The whistle blew once more and Arthur tried to turn his mind to bigger things, like the thought of seeing Ethel and his daughter again. He departed the train and found himself standing on a flagstone platform with a wooden roof. He made it only a few feet when he heard a woman screaming. He turned brack and saw the woman who had been enduring her husband’s abuse. She stumbled from the car, screaming and waving her arms. Where was that shriveled balloon faced man?

Other passengers were stopping and staring, but no one dared come close to the woman. Her husband followed her onto the platform. He’d covered his eyes with his hands and was still trying to make it down the car’s precarious steps. He fell and the small crowd gasped. Still, no one was courageous enough to come close. It was as though they were afraid that whatever had possessed this couple was contagious. The man was lying on his back and he was yelling in pain and his body was shaking, but he refused to take his hands from his eyes.

Only his wife came up to him. She should’ve taken the chance to leave him here, thought Arthur. Yet the bonds people put on each other’s minds were hard to break. She knelt down beside the man and tried to pull his hands away. He held them fast. Now everyone was waiting with gruesome curiosity to see what horror he was covering. At last, the woman managed to pull her husband’s hands away, but before anyone could see his eyes, she placed her own palms over his face. She had stopped screaming and was muttering something now. Arthur realized it was a prayer.

Then her hands caught fire.

Arthur didn’t believe what he saw at first, but there it was. Flames had engulfed the woman’s hands and the man’s face. Now the screaming resumed. The woman pulled her hands away and clasped them to her chest and ran off, black smoke trailing behind her. Her husband rolled over on the flagstone and snuffed out the fire, but he was still writhing in tremendous pain. By then the railroad staff was pushing the crowd away, under the direction of a the single cop who’d arrived. Arthur hurried away.

Although he’d never seen quite that same spectacle, he’d seen similar things and was not about to take up that world again. With one hand he touched the back of the other, where the knot of triangles stood out from his skin. It felt warm where Bonnie’s finger had been.

He walked to the back of the station and saw a yellow DeSoto Skyliner cab parked in the gravel lot. A man in a tattered walker cap and tweed jacket leaned against its curved hood. His head was tipped towards a newspaper, perhaps less for reading and more for protecting his cigarette from the wind. That wind carried the smell of potato chips, as it always did. The newspaper was concerned with other matters, mainly President Coolidge’s announcement that he would not seek a another term. Maybe tomorrow it would say something about what had happened right here. The man reading it noticed Arthur from the corner of his eye , folded his paper under his arm, and walked over. As he did so, black police cars pulled into the station.

“What’s that all about?” said the man.

“Didn’t you hear all that?”

“Nope.”

“You’re lying.”

“These things seem to follow you.”

Arthur turned his head back and saw Bonnie standing on the station steps. She struck a prim pose, with her suitcase and cane balanced as though she needed no assistance with them at all. The heavy object was still in her pocket.

It was true. He’d come all this way on the promise that he’d left it all behind. He really had heard what she'd said to him when she'd touched that symbol. What could he do if his troubles could follow him on the train?

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This is my first attempt at serialized fiction on steemit. I would love your feedback, whether you love it or hate it or are just indifferent. Seriously! Just do it. Also, I would love upvotes and resteems, like the rest of us.

Now read part 2 !