Hello! This the first story of a series of shot fiction I’ll be publishing. I’m cheating a little bit, because it is not actually inspired in Mexico City (since we don’t have passengers trains, unless you want to go to Tequila). However, I found it suitable to publish it as my first, because, as you can see, its name was the inspiration for my blog. I also made the illustration myself. All of it is digitally painted in Adobe Photoshop. I apologize if it is a bit long, but I really think it matches the current theme in my life. You can find other thing I’ve written in here. I hope you enjoy it!
Chapter 1: Max
The train left without him.
He could still discern its silhouette in the distance. The locomotive steam unfocused the wagons, blurring the train’s sinuous form, like the last images before waking up from a dream. But little did Max know about it. He had forgotten the last time he had slept.
The young man didn’t stop right away. He run after the train, like he could actually reach it, and it took him a few seconds to lower the speed of his strides, while he cleaned the hope off his shoe soles. It was the second time he was late for the future.
Heavily, he dropped the huge bag he was carrying on the floor of the station. He sighed and looked at the clock. Then he remembered it didn’t matter, he had nowhere to go.
Max was a foreigner. His passport was full of stops, but no destiny, and his watch measured the seconds in miles. In his back, he only carried a camera that had seen more worlds than his eyes and a wrinkly return ticket to a nameless city. The date was still blank.
The young man stretched his pained muscles and sat on a near bench. The platform was almost empty. Besides him and a forgotten baggage, there was only an anonymous homeless man, curled up in a corner, who claimed to sing lullabies in exchange of a few coins. He was deeply asleep, victim of the irony of his profession. Sometimes, even dreams had a price in foreign currency.
Max contemplated him, while he looked among the folds and pockets of his jacket, until he finally found his wallet. He sighed and stood up. Inside there were either two shots of whisky or a cheap hotel room.
It was a pity. He was very thirsty.
Chapter 2. Valentina
Valentina had the night shift. It wasn’t even midnight and she was already regretting, among other things, not finishing high school and her shoe choice for the evening.
It seemed like any other day. Less busy, but still tedious. The bar was made of shadows and the background music played muffled moans that escaped from the bathroom, mixed up with Guns N’ Roses covers.
The same old drunk men tried to erase pieces of their lives with alcohol and came up to her with yet another lecherous opening line. But it was Valentina’s lucky day; she had only received three sexual propositions so far. It was probably a brand new record.
She had started working there three years ago, when she realized she was running out of future. She wandered to the train station in search of a ticket to find her father, when she saw the bar, between two train rails that ran in opposite senses. It was a place for those who had no direction.
The treacherous construction glimmered under a blinking orange sign that was missing an “A”. She looked at it and, when she confirmed she didn’t have enough money for the train ticket, she decided to turn the bar into a destination and her father into a stranger.
The girl wasn’t much to look at, truth be told. She was small and skinny, one of those persons you tend to forget they are even there. One of those who seemed to exist in past tense. She was near her twenties, but kept the look of someone who has lived a lot in a very short time. Her hair bristled in every direction, like the wind had ruffled it, despite the fan had been broken a couple of weeks ago. Her left hand nails were chipped and she had a permanent running mascara, for all those tears she never cried.
An hour hadn’t even passed since she started her shift, but the clock over the bar was not only marking her missing years between every second, but the remaining minutes before her rent payment. Who would have thought it? Mediocrity was expensive.
The girl sighed. The night was slow and Valentina was about to exchange false expectations for a couple of coins with the working men when he entered the place.
Chapter 3. The waitress and the foreigner
There wasn’t anything exceptional about his looks, except maybe he was the youngest of the crowd. His clothes were battered and deteriorated and he was still carrying dust from the last three cities he had set foot in. He had an ungainly walk, hunched under the weight of his backpack and a vague expression, like his mind was carrying even more pounds than his shoulders. However, Valentina liked his unkempt beard, although it added a few yesterdays to his face, and his eyes, because they seemed polyglots.
When he got in, he didn’t say anything. There was no need. They both spoke fluently the broken people language. Max went straight ahead to the bar without looking at her and Valentina poured the cheapest drink on the menu. Sometimes words come in all kinds of shapes.
The young man sat heavily on the high bench, with his backpack between his legs and, without even a look to the waitress, he gulped the drink in one sip.
“Rough night?” Valentina asked indifferently.
Max didn’t answer. He just reached the glass towards her. The man thought he saw a grin, but he wasn’t sure. Max emptied his second-hand whisky once more and the girl tried to pour him again, but he stopped her.
“Afraid you won’t find your way back home?” She asked. The tone was mocking, with a slight cynical taste that irritated Max, who raised his gaze and answered sharply:
“I don’t have a home to go back.“ Valentina didn’t answer, but she seemed to find him amusing. She leaned against the liquor shelf and contemplated him, not accusingly but with an almost childish curiosity.
The traveller had a small wrinkle between his brows that was starting to show and, by the way he held his empty glass, he was left-handed. She liked left-handed people, they seem to see the world from the other side.
“Sometimes it’s better not having anywhere to go back to.” She said absent mindedly while she cleaned a beer pint with a rag.“Because there is always an expiration date for returns.”
It was the first time Max actually saw her since he entered the place. Her walk intrigued him, like in any moment she could grow roots, and he liked the freckle road marked down her cheeks, like eternal tears. He wondered how much did she have to cry to draw those courses in her face.
Max looked at her. She was perhaps too young and her voice was scratchy, almost a note lower than usual, faded through alcohol and cigarettes. But he liked her eyes, they were the colour of a natural phenomenon.
Her appearance was younger than her words, but he was glad to find out that, despite she didn’t have many years behind her, she had enough to encourage his train of thought.
“Are you just passing by?” She asked suddenly, taking him out of his mind. However, he didn’t fail to notice how those storm-coloured eyes looked at him a second longer than usual in him. Max smiled. Maybe he could still catch the second train of the night.
“That depends.”
“Of what?”
“On if you invite me another drink.” Max hid six different propositions in his smile and Valentina understood them all. She didn’t smile back. Her eyes turned suspicious and she stepped back a little bit, barely keeping her balance over those shoes with high aspirations.
“I’d loose my job.” She said.
“I’m sorry.” He rushed to answer. Max put his last two bills in the counter and cleared his throat to hide his embarrassment. Valentina followed the route of his wallet and mentally recorded the third pocket in the left of his globetrotter backpack. The one that held the wallet.
The foreigner picked up his luggage with a gasp and he was raising from the table when a hand stopped him.
“Wait… I may have some more whisky.” She suggested quietly. “In my place.”
Valentina could read the agreement in his eyes even before than in his lips, she leaned over the counter and smiled; she had just found the rest of her rent. Max smiled back; he had just found his hotel room.
Chapter 4. Them
He smelled like road dust, the rain that had stuck in his boots, sweat and stranger.
She smelled like cigarette smoke, cheap alcohol, dried tears and lavender.
He knew how to kiss in hundreds of languages.
She stole all the foreign words from his mouth with the first kiss.
She tasted like past.
He tasted like future.
He drew in her body all the routes he knew.
She exchanged all of her kisses for foreign currency.
He… He had travelled to hundreds of places. His shoes had stepped intro 127 cities, four continents and twenty-three airports and in all of that time he had just made one promise to himself: Never return to the same place.
That night he broke it. He arrived to Valentina’s port over and over and over again before the sunrise.
Chapter 5. The thief and the opportunistic nomad
He slept. She didn’t.
It didn’t seem like it, though. The mattress sank beneath the travellers weight and it didn’t seem to lighten with the volatility of dreams. Max was anchored to reality.
Valentina, on the other side, didn’t move. Immutable to the spell of the night, she laid static in the wrong side of the bed. It wasn’t like Valentina had any kind of emotional appeal to the right side of the mattress. She had left pieces of dreams in all the extensions of the sheets anyways. But in the right side of the bed was Max’s backpack.
The traveller’s life had a 55-pound limit in coach, however, Max seemed to walk around with an overweight luggage with additional fees.
Valentina herself had little belongings: A lighter, a pair of second-hand shoes with an intact sole and the photograph of a stranger in her night drawer. Her entire life could fit in that backpack.
Careful not to wake him up, she spied over the young man resting body. She recognized immediately: The third pocket on the left.
The mattress’s springs creaked quietly and the young man stirred in his sleep. The traveller stretched to her side of the bed, like he was migrating from one oneiric world to another and almost imprisoned her against the bedroom wall. Even asleep, Max was a world-trotter.
Valentina held her breath and looked through the window. Sunrise was almost there. She should hurry.
They weren’t touching. They hadn’t slept entwined, but their proximity was closer to a routine lover than to a bar stranger.
The young woman stretched herself between the blankets, like if she were swimming in them and with the grace of a jellyfish or an air dancer she curved her body over his and pushed her arm under the night table, were that nomad backpack was laying.
The fabric creaked slightly under her fingers, but Valentina accompanied the noise with a soft whisper that turned her theft into a lullaby. And then, slowly, she reached the so-wanted third pocket without disturbing its owner.
However, when she had barely pocketed her month’s rent, Max’s body turned and made her loose her precarious balance. While holding a curse in her lips, she fell over the young man’s body who was now widely awake.
“Insomnia?” he asked. His pitch hid a nocturnal smile. The mocking tone and the absence of drowsiness of his voice made Valentina doubt if he was ever really asleep. However, the way he held her waist, restoring her balance over his body, made her think that maybe he could still misinterpret her night crimes.
“Sorry.” She apologized, improvising. She stretched herself again over the empty space off the bed until she reached the drawer in the night table. Discretely, she placed the stolen wallet inside it and took something else in exchange. “Can’t sleep without this.” She lied showing him the photograph she kept next to her eyeliner and the spare change for the subway.
Max absently scratched her chin and took the wrinkled photograph from Valentina. There was an ageless stranger, with a three-day beard and eyes the colour of a natural phenomenon. Valentina’s eyes.
“Is he your father?” He asked, examining the edges of the portrait. They seemed wet, but he couldn’t tell if it was because of rain or tears.
“I don’t know.” She confessed, detaching herself from his embrace. She slowly returned to her side of the bed and talked to him from the shadows. ”Found it in the street when I was three. It’s the closest thing I’ve had to a father.”
Max let his head fall in the pillow again with what seemed like a sigh. He put on of his hands under his neck, but didn’t look at her.
“Sometimes it’s better not to know who your father is.” He said with his eyes locked to the room ceiling.
“Do you know it?” She asked turning to face him.
“Oh, yes.”
Valentina didn’t ask anything else. She just glanced at the photograph that, for so many nights, she had witnessed becoming a dream.
“I guess he’s better than the real one.” She said, pointing towards the photo. “At least he has never left my drawer.”
They both remained silent. Valentina tried to scrutinize Max’s face among the shadows, but it was too late. The traveller had already packed his thoughts.
Something called her attention in the darkness, however. A tattoo. A compass-shaped tattoo in the middle of his left forearm.
“It has no north.” Valentina said, mockingly. She caressed the edges of the compass. It wasn’t an invitation, no, it was simply full of that childish curiosity that surrounded her life. “How do you know where to go if you have no north?”
“That’s the secret.” He answered, turning to face her with a half-smile. “You can’t really get anywhere new if you know where to go”.
Valentina raised her gaze towards Max. She had a smile and a question in the corner of her lips.
“Do you know where are you going?”
“Somewhere south. I think.”
“Have any family there?”
“No. I saw it in a poster outside your bar.”
She laughed quietly, almost like humming.
“What’s so funny?” He asked, watching her with a mixture of intrigue and suspicion.
“An anonymous letter once told me that there’s where my father lived.” He could hear a smile in her voice and felt how her fingers started to trace more invisible tattoos in his forearm. For that night, Max was a blank canvas and she was all of those things she will never be.
“Why you never went after him?” Max asked.
“Don’t know… What if I liked the photograph guy better?”
Max glanced at the ceiling again and exhaled.
“I’ve always looked for excuses to leave. Not to stay.” He said at last.
“I’ve always been somebody else’s excuse to leave.”
Max watched her rather curiously. She was there; right behind that eyeshadow she used to dress up like a grown-up. For the first time in the night he could actually see the girl she still was.
“Why have you never left?” He inquired, at last, while his gaze followed the trace of the caresses in his arm.
“I’ve never had anywhere to go.”
Nomad and settler remained silent once more. Max’s thoughts wandered by the extension of his mind; Valentina’s were stuck in a reality full of missed trains.
“Do you really don’t have anywhere to go back to?” She asked after a while.
“I don’t know anymore.” He said dryly.
The silence entropy told all the stories they never spoke during that night. However, they both listened.
“You were never asleep, were you?” She asked. There was no offense in her voice, just an almost mocking inquisitiveness.
“And you never had any whisky”. The both looked at each other with the first lights of the sunrise. They have had sex, but it was the first time they were really naked.
“Why can’t you sleep?” She finally asked. Among the darkness, she cleaned the tears that left another road of freckles in her face.
“I don’t know.” He answered. ”I’m afraid I’ve ran out of dreams.”
Valentina watched him and raised her head from the pillow. She lent it to Max.
“Here” she said giving it to him. “I’ve got plenty in here. Maybe one will suit you”.
And, for the first time in a long while, Max could sleep with one of Valentina’s borrowed dreams. She, on the other hand, spent the rest of the night wide-awake. In the early morning she finally understood the difference that set them apart in the middle of the darkness embrace. He trotted worlds and she trotted dreams.
Chapter 6. The orphan and the nomad
“You remind me of someone.” Valentina called. He, who had been buttoning his shirt, raised his gaze and found her leaned against the threshold.
“What?” He asked, confused.
“My father. You remind me of my father”.
Max looked at her, astonished, and blinked a couple of times.
“You said you have never met him.”
“I haven’t.” She said. “I only imagine he was also one of those persons who leave”.
Max said nothing. He finished his last button while he watched the street breathing outside Valentina’s window. He took his backpack and turned.
“I think this is yours.” Valentina playfully showed him his worn-out leather wallet and Max smiled.
“You can keep it.” He offered while he adjusted the straps of the mobile life he carried in his back. “It isn’t much, but…”
Valentina snorted, rather amused.
“It isn’t much? It is nothing! I added a few coins in there so you could, at least, buy a decent meal at the station. And don’t say a word!” She rushed when Max opened his mouth to discuss. “You won’t be able to flirt your way around other waitress if you keep that skinny”.
Max laughed and, without thinking it, he leaned to steal one last kiss. The only souvenir he would take from that city which wasn’t even drawn on the maps.
They separated. Max took the wallet and Valentina looked at him a few seconds in silence.
“Could you do me a favour?”
“Yes?”
“When you reach south, search for a man with my eyes and your beard and tell him he has a daughter”.
He watched her while he looked for signs of irony in her voice. He found none.
“I can’t do that.” He looked at her, powerless. “Do you know how many men could be there who match that description? What would happen if I tell the wrong guy the news that he is a father?”.
“It doesn’t matter. At least, that way, somebody will know I exist”.
Max headed to the door while his silence hid the epitaph of all the words he couldn’t say to her. However, when he reached the threshold, he stopped and faced her once more. The personal weather she carried in her eyes forecast rain.
“If you hadn’t tried to rob me, you’d have been a very good reason to stay”. He said at last.
“If you don’t hurry, I may still be”. Valentina pointed towards the clock next to the entrance and all trace of flood disappeared from her pupils. “You’re going to miss that train again and you are not that good-looking to find another place to stay for the night”.
Max carried his backpack in one shoulder and smiled while he exited the apartment.
“I think I was wrong.” She called one last time, before he turned in the corner. The lack of minutes was the muse of her words. “You’re nothing like my father.”
“I’m not?” He asked. “He was beardless, then?”
“No.” She answered. “At least I have the pleasure of remembering you”.
Valentina closed the door while he walked at the end of her world. And there, in the night table, the one that had been an accomplice in her night theft, she discovered a wrinkled plane ticket with the name of a city she didn’t know and a blank date.
Chapter 7. The dreamer
Max arrived to the station with a few minutes to spare. And there, while he waited in the platform, he used Valentina’s coins to buy a lullaby from the homeless man. He used it to dream all the way down to the south, there where his compass couldn’t point.