Final Destination: Green Mountain WC 665

Wanting to get home in time, he shared his excitement, dreams, and fate.

Final Destination: Green Mountain

          Just 24 years old, with 24 dollars in his pocket and a train ticket to Omaha, Nebraska. The numbers felt like a cruel joke, a universe toying with the fragile thread of my hope. The train groaned as it cut through the Iowa plains, its steel bones creaking under the weight of passengers, luggage, and the unspoken anxieties of a world not yet fractured by war or depression. My hands tightened around the worn leather satchel at my side, the 24 dollars inside feeling like a meager offering to fate.

          My wife's letters, frayed at the edges, ink smudged by her tears, burned in my coat pocket. "Please be careful," she'd written. "I cannot bear the thought of loss." I had laughed then, a brittle sound, assuring her the rails were dependable, that progress itself would not falter on a March morning in 1910. But now, as the countryside blurred into a wash of brown and gray, I wondered how much progress owed to any of us.

          I spoke to everyone. The woman across the aisle, her face half-hidden by a shawl, offered me a stale biscuit and a look that asked why you're trembling. I told her I was visiting family. Lies came easy in times like these. The Ticket Collector, a grizzled man with a pocket watch that ticked louder than his footsteps, checked my pass three times. "Next stop, Green Mountain," he rasped, and I wanted to grab his collar and beg him to make the engine go faster. The sour-looking elderly woman three seats back caught me staring at the window, my jaw clenched. "You're headed somewhere important," she said, not a question. I nodded, and she turned her face to the glass, her silence as heavy as mine.

          The baby will be born soon. My mind wove scenarios: a boy, my namesake, or a girl, her mother's legacy. Lila and I had argued over the names, our laughter echoing through the cramped apartment in Kansas City. She'd wanted Josephine if it was a girl, after her mother, who had died giving birth to her. I'd insisted Henry for a boy--my father's name, a man I'd never met. We'd compromised: the child would bear my name if it were a boy, hers if it was a girl. But now, time was the only thing we'd compromised on, and it was slipping.

          The train slowed as we approached Green Mountain, the engineer's whistle a shrill cry that dissolved into an awful, metallic screech. My heart stuttered. The woman with the shawl gasped; the Ticket Collector dropped my ticket. The world tilted. Windows shattered. For a moment, sickening and surreal, I felt weightless, as though the air itself had been ripped from my lungs. Then came the impact. A jagged, bone-crunching roar as steel met stone.

          Chaos. Smoke. Screams that felt both distant and intimate, like they belonged to someone else's body. I crawled through the wreckage, my hands bloodied, my satchel torn open. The 24 dollars was gone, scattered like ash. So were the biscuits, the letters, the names I had rehearsed in my head. The elderly woman lay motionless nearby, her face finally at peace. The woman across the aisle clutched her leg, the bone jutting through fabric like a twisted monument. "Is anyone... injured?" I called to the conductor; my voice was hollow. He didn't answer. He couldn't. His skull was split open, the pocket watch at his side now a useless hush.

          They would find me, eventually. The townsfolk of Green Mountain, with their burlap bandages and solemn eyes. They would send word to Omaha. But by then, the baby would be born--my baby--with no father but a name, etched into its skin like a promise or a wound. I lay back in the mud, the sky bleeding into my vision, and wondered if my child would ever know the weight of 24 years and 24 dollars, or the price of a train that arrived too late.

Word Count: 665

Prompt: Just 24 years old, with 24 dollars in his pocket and a train ticket to