June Star carries large, trunk-like baggages to the Heaven Express. Easily, she is the most awkward passenger on the train. Anyone can argue she is the most unruly one, too: her cold but sweaty hands touch everywhere she passes, and she is perspiring like barn animals. Her cases are huge: she brings a clock, all her clothes, her souvenirs from her travels for all these years in her bags. She wants to go back home to where she belongs: tequila, grapevines, and land fertile enough to breed men. Her divorce case, with her husband, is also huge: word has it that she spent over one-hundred thousand of her husband’s money in two years and now she’s leaving him. For what? More money. More savings. More Freedom. But, ironically, she has no children—she never plans to have one. Sexless nights don’t breed children. As she heads on the train, her husband, sitting in the cool house on a mid-summer day, wonders how her life will turn out in the next few years, but without giving it another ounce of thought he ended everything with her. He signs his marriage away and calls the lawyer, saying, it’s done—I’ll go to you later today. Life is difficult for him, since there is no monogamy or steadfast and indomitable love anymore. He remembers one snowy weekend in the middle of December, when the heat in the town went out; she was visibly shivering, grinding her teeth like cement mixers. He looked at her and asked, is everything good? I have never heard you shiver like this. To that, she was colder than she was when she answered, yeah, you son of a b****; don’t you think that I’m cold? Nothing’s good! Nothing’s good when I am with you, you son of a b****—get out of my sight, and go buy a heater or something because I am freezing over here—go, go, go—what you waiting for? Me? Do something. Their lives turn for the worse ever since: they never sleep in the same bedroom again, and neither greets each other when they return home. He resists the urge of talking to her, because she couldn’t give a dime of care to anyone—even her father, Bailey, before she dies. He ends up buried in the earth, without casket or funeral, because her siblings were too poor to pay for anything, and she refuses to pay anything. Anyone who can’t protect their own mother doesn’t deserve to be buried, she insists, and even after all these years she still can’t let go of this. Whenever someone speaks of her grandma’s sudden death, she simply says, I don’t know why you’re talking about this; I guess karma has its ways of haunting someone. These days she keeps dreaming of her grandma, of how she was shot to death on the good ol’ earth almost three decades ago, lying in the ruby sheen on the earth. Too sad a way to die, gran—you deserved better, she thinks to herself, as some steely streams roll down the sides of her face and distort her eyeliners, and she turns into an old clown without makeup, pretentiousness, or even sadness. Everything just looks raw when she reveals her powdered skin, her resplendent, focused eyes like those of the Misfit’s—who just withered away in jail few months ago. She gives off a nonchalant look out the window, as the moving train shifts one tree behind another, few birds carry some silhouettes of shadows across the clouds, from one to another and to the next. And, as if she sees her grandmother’s staunch angelic figure bouncing between the sky, waving at her, she breaks a huge shriek, and gasped, b****, b****, get away from me—you are dead! Get away from the rest of us who’re alive, you old monster! Leave me alone! Everyone in the train looks at the poor young woman howling for no apparent reason, except, maybe at her thread-like fingers that contrast well with her protruding thighs and abdomens. For the whole minute, the woman disturbs every passenger who is asleep—and for those who aren’t, they are bound to have nightmares. She, out of humiliation, sits down and looks away and doesn’t make eye contact for the rest of the trip, but because she cannot forget what just happened, she takes out an eye mask to hide her broken soul, and she sleeps for the next few hours until the train reaches her hometown. Oh… right, she thinks as she leaves the train, mom and dad are gone. She then lulls her own body around the deserted town with no one but strangers and strangely shaped squirrels and sycamores, while thinking what might have happened if no one passes away, yet, and the turkeys and rice she will be looking at right now. She reaches home, and without food she starts to unpack. She takes out the clock, reading three-thirty, whose battery is inexplicably missing, and puts it on the wall next to her bed. What if time stopped for me, too—granny? She then gradually spreads her body on the bed, and closes her eyes. As her vision narrows, just as everything becomes a slurry, meaningless mess, a carmine and brownish stain isn’t there few seconds ago suddenly appears on the surface of the clock, and it enlarges geometrically proportion to time until it fills her eyes with disgust and pain and memory and divorce and death and angels and demons… And, without knowing it is already midnight, she shouts,

I wouldn't live in a broken down place like this for a million bucks!

—After Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)