Soft hums mask my ears as the train whisks itself through the tunnel, leaping above a Milky Way of light as it thunders across a bridge. Passengers’ faces are eclipsed by the tango of shadows, and I feel the chill of the darkness as I approach Lia. Her valley green hair frames her face as she whispers about Ma with the lilt of a siren. Her fluid whispers dance in front of us: a mother-to-be with lips upturned, cupping her belly rich with the songs of life, lilac hair curling around her fruit. My mother’s figure flickers in time with the shadows, and words from another world seep into my ears. The words flow and ebb with the darkness that walks along the walls of the train. I can see those words in the three creases between my mother’s eyebrows, in the bloody red that fills her eyes, in the charred brown that seeps into the roots of her hair. I stand up abruptly, and the train drifts to a stop. Lia cackles, and the image of my mother distorts. Her eyes fall into deep gray pits, and her neck twists and shrinks to the bone. Doors appear and swing open. Lia’s stare becomes blank, and a monster of noise emerges from the open doors, slippery strands of foreign sounds encasing my ears, tearing at my mouth. The cool surface of the train floor freezes the beating of my heart as I fall, and the shadows extend their dark tentacles towards me from behind the doorways.

My nerves always crackle after the whispers that hold the memory of my mother’s hands, made from the glow of the moon. There are other wanderers, each who have spun me tales of the mother I had with lilac hair, their murmurs hanging where the shadows dare not cross. But each time the train stops, the stardust on Ma’s skin is eclipsed by claw-like projections, and she becomes what lurks in the shadows, straining to reach beyond the darkness. The snakes of sound always ensnare what remains of the wanderers’ whispers, and Ma dissipates into a memory as the rhythm of the train resumes. Whisk, whoosh, whizz, out of the tunnel. Clack, clack, clack above an upside-down sky. Click, click, click, the doors shut before the monster gets me.

I am a child of the train more than a child of the woman with lilac hair. The train keeps the monsters away, shifts the shadows so they glide around me as they pace back and forth along the walls. I remember a time when the silhouettes wrapped themselves in thick coats around me, when the monsters held my hands in handcuffs of sharp words and quick hands. Ma’s claws tried to hold me, but they only crushed me. That’s when the train beckoned to me with its polished windows and walls of ivory. It promised to stop time, to allow me to break free from the claws, to bring out the mother I saw within Ma. But what the train truly gifted me were the stories. A woven blanket of suspense, passion, and loss hung around our shoulders, and our murmuring would add a bold zigzag here, or a patch of polka-dots there.

Shadows have since smothered the blanket in swaths of grey, and it’s been countless stretches of tunnel since I’ve heard a voice. “You just can’t hear the others, silly,” Lia would scoff when I complained. But her lips formed two white lines when I begged to hear about the tales obscured by fog. “I can’t tell you the stories you refuse to listen to. Look at me, darling. Don’t you ask me about your Ma. Don’t you ask me ever,” Lia snapped, her voice reaching a tall crescendo. The silence between us afterwards terrified me more than the unknowns that stalked the tunnels. I clung to her desperately until light stepped in shyly, conscious of the receding gaze of the darkness.

Three hundred and fifty passengers later, there was no one left to spill the secrets of the enigma with lilac hair, besides Lia. The shadows scuttled across my face and coaxed me to take the forbidden fruit. Ask Lia, they sang, she knows. My blanket of stories was more shadow than color now, and Lia wove it alone. The cycles of tunnels and lights became monotonous and numbing. Images of Ma danced like fireflies between us whenever Lia spoke to me.

“You worry me every time we go into those tunnels,” Lia sighed, her eyes roaring like thunder, “It’s about time you stop whining about the dark.”

“I won’t ask about Ma. I just don’t like how cold it is in the dark. That’s all.”

“Have you ever thought of going home?”

“Home feels all wrong now, and I like the train better anyways. There might only be the shell of a house, much less a home, left.”

A mother loves her child unconditionally. A mother’s love for her child transcends the stubborn boundaries of time and space. Three hundred and fifty passengers have laminated these truths in every fold of my brain. I never saw Ma with her lilac hair, her soft hands working on construction paper flowers, her legs twirling with mine in time to holiday music until the passengers told me about her. Their words link my memories to the blanket soaked in tales, and the facts and fairy tales quickly become an inextricable melting pot. The train shields me from Ma’s lies.

It occurs to me that lies should be lilac-colored if they were something you could pick up at the grocery store. Each lie I know pulses madly against my skin, invisible lumps stuck behind an impenetrable wall. I am blind in the tunnels, and for the first time, I feel the shadows teeter against me in their silent, hysterical laughter. I crumple against Lia. My thoughts are as blind to their course as I am as I stand and take in Lia’s lush green hair for the last time. Lia doesn’t lie, does she?

Lia’s hair isn’t that of grassy slopes and early-April leaves anymore. It’s the same dirty, charred brown that soaked Ma’s lilac curls at the end of Lia’s charade. I wonder if all the lies were mine, if all the passengers were just my actors in some sick tragedy of illusion. At once, the strands of noise unravel themselves and surge into my ears. Their whispers are raw and rupture the lies that bulge beneath my skin. My childhood was marked by a pregnancy doused in regret, empty syringes scattered on the bathroom counter, and nights huddled in the closet as heated arguments shook the floor. My face flushes with shame as I meet Lia’s gaze.

“You people are the ones who cast the shadows. Why do you want to stay here, where it’s the other way around?” Lia’s foot pokes at an invisible hole in the train floor, “The train doors won’t open for you again, you know.”

I was just another actress in the sadistic drama of the shadows. The doors breathe in whispers as they contemplate whether or not to tidy up the mess of memories, tuck the actress away, and let the show go on. I stand and watch the faces of the passengers morph as the image of my mother had. Their skin folds and sags, and rivulets of silver run from the crowns of their heads.

Five feet away, a blanket of starlight winks. I fall towards it wildly, my slippery palms grasping Lia’s hands. She begins to trill with that lilt again, siren-like, her voice climbing an unsteady scale. “Every passenger has their Lia on that train. Keeping dreamers trapped in an ivory case, that’s what I do. I’m a horrible thing, and you were the daughter I tricked myself into thinking I could have. Ha! I suppose I’m a dreamer too. I suppose that’s why I let you go.”

The glimmer of the stars blots out the dark of the shadows as I am swaddled in the warmth of the glowing orbs. Cords of light swarm Lia, tearing her apart into a puddle of grey. Swiftly, the celestial blanket is pulled from underneath me, and I watch as the puddle Lia had become settles into my shadow with a carefree swish. I touch it gingerly, and flinch when my fingers graze sidewalk. The train is no longer my master, and neither is Ma.