The Forge and the 5:07

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by Daniel Johnson

The thing about Franklin is that it’s really a railroad town. Back in the nineteenth century, when Horace Mann was first elected to state office, he stretched a corridor of commuter rail thirty miles southwest of Boston, all the way to a station at the border of his (and my) hometown. The Forge Park platform is the first on the outbound Franklin/Purple Line, so named because each silver train car is laterally halved by a strip of regal violet paint. It sits at the base of a cratered parking lot, the platform does, adjacent the Garelick Farms factory with its dairy-white smokestacks and warehouses and steam that billows milky above Franklin's signature jagged pine. Locals call the station The Forge.

Growing up here, I didn’t think much of the Purple Line, or use it at all until my adolescence, when my friends and I occasionally rode it to Sox games so that none of us had to drive and we could pound booze from wadded paper bags. Sometimes it seemed like the town didn’t think much of it, either. No one moved to Franklin for commuting convenience, and most of the people in my neighborhood who worked in the city carpooled together along the Pike. There weren’t even any of the typical trackside shenanigans you’d expect to hear about: no kids who played chicken and lost feet, no fight clubs in the abandoned mill buildings. It was always just sort of there, and in those earlier years I’d more or less forget about it until I had to wait for a train to pass at the Union Street crossing before I could continue on my way to wherever I was going, which was never far. My curfew was unique from those of my friends in that mine placed boundaries on both time and space. I was my parents’ first child.

Some nights, before I had to employ the dull roar of a box fan for sleep-aid in high school, I’d wake up from my early bedtime to the sad, high-pitched bellow of the 11:30pm—the last train home. It called out somewhere past the acres of sleepy homesteads and orange streetlights beyond my bedroom window. It would occasionally invade the strangest of my dreams, the horn would, and disguise itself as other things. I remember one nightmare where it doubled as the song of some predatory and prehistorically large bird that circled above me at the end of my driveway, while I was for some reason on all fours and vomiting in the storm drain there.

It wasn’t until I moved back from college that I started to really notice the rail’s distinct omnipresence. There were always these brown trails of dry earth that kicked up along the downtown tracks and hung squat in the breezeless New England humidity, long after whatever train had gone by. It was only then that I registered the echoes of locomotive churning audible from most central parts of town as a sort of heartbeat that dwarfed the suburban din of little league tournaments, the distorted chimes of ice cream truck jingles, the groans of faraway landscape machinery. I hadn’t before then acknowledged Franklin as the crossroads it really was. The idea of growing up in a place where there was a means of escape—like, a very reliable and regimented means of escape—meant that I wasn’t the prisoner I liked to imagine myself to be.

I worked as a county paperboy for a while after I moved home. I would spend the midnight hours driving around the bones of the town, smoking bowls and drinking RedBull and listening to live Guster albums at inappropriate volumes. I sped a lot, chucked poorly folded County Gazettes onto the dew-laden baronial grasses of all the residential exurbs. It was the type of lonely, purgatorial job I hoped I’d have been beyond by then, but there was a small part of me that enjoyed haunting Franklin's recesses every night. I tended to finish my route anywhere between 4:45-5:15am, and sometimes I’d grab an iced coffee and banana from the Dunkin on 140 and head down to The Forge to watch the 5:07 leave.

Always, a very particular type of older man with elbow patches on his blazer waited in the predawn twilight for that first train out along the yellow platform. Several of them stood beneath the initial chugs of the Garelick Farms steam, which sort of hovered still along the cratered lot’s rim, like smog. I would watch these men keep to themselves, rock on their toes, look to the paling sky, pull out their phones. The blue light from their screens bled into the icy beams from the station awning’s overheads. Their faces were swollen and droopy from having just woken up and I remember it all looked very cold to me, even in the summer. 

There were nights, though, when I’d finish my route late and miss the 5:07’s departure out of The Forge. In these cases I’d often catch it en route to Boston at the Union Street crossing on my way home. The railroad bells would knell empty through the yawning thoroughfare of darkened storefronts and townhouses, the warning lights would blink a tired red. Beyond my headlights, the silver and purple streak of that first train would blur on by.

Sometimes I’d be so sleep-deprived or high or some pleasant mixture of both that I’d imagine I could see my reflection in the moving metal, or that I was on that train, dressed all professorially and important like the men at Forge Park, looking to everyone like I had a place to get to and a purpose when I got there. It was like I was in two places at once, in those moments: headed smoothly towards the diamond haze of the city skyline, but still stuck in the driver’s seat of my old Jeep, watching myself go.

We Burned Out

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by Daniel Johnson

Whenever Helen and I spent our nights drinking fifths of rum at the marina down the street from campus, I called her Helen of Troy. She was Greek, and there were all those ships, and in that naked moonlight her olive body looked as if some hunchbacked old Athenian sculptor had spent his lifetime casting its mold. Sailboats rocked against the pier and the warped wood of the docks would cry out. I told her they were made restless by her beauty, the boats. She knew it was just the ocean and that I was drunk. She would tell me to stop it, but in that way that meant she wasn’t really sure whether or not she wanted me to.

Helen wore nautical outfits a lot: anchor belt-buckles, lighthouse earrings, navy and white striped blouses. Her family was rich and we went to school on an island. She carried a miniature ceramic Tragic mask on her car keys that dangled out the back pocket of her brass-buttoned sailor shorts. When I was with her, I usually wore an undershirt and an unwashed pair of Levis with one of those mini pockets-within-a-pocket, where I stored two Ativan in case I had an episode during the day.

Most of those nights, we finished our fifths and tossed the empties into the Atlantic. They’d bob there and reflect coins of moonlight on the waves and sails and sometimes on our faces until they sank to the shallows. We would walk back up the hill towards campus and I’d rest one hand against the almost unnoticeable impression of the pills in the denim. I made it look like I was being smooth: just a thumb hooked in a beltloop. In my other hand, I’d hold Helen’s. The streetlights above us were orange and globular, like old diver’s helmets atop stakes of black iron.

She always did this thing where she would walk slightly in front of me and not look back. I didn’t mind. I’d watch the backs of her legs and think about how all I wanted was to feel them against my body every night, the way I could feel the pills. About halfway up the hill, I would know I needed to take them because the walk was steep and the rum made my heart roll.  

Part of me thought the reason Helen never came home with me after the marina was because, by the time we reached campus and I asked her to come to bed, my breath smelled rotten and synthetic from the Ativan. Sometimes they scraped against the roof of my mouth for the rest of the walk home before they’d swallow down. I imagined they left trails of residue, like long white cuts, along the back of my throat.

It was always the absence of something that triggered my anxiety. It was the silence that came when my roommate would go home for the weekend and leave me alone in our fluorescent dorm room without the box fan he used for white noise. It was the nights when I wasn’t surrounded by bar lights that blinked arrythmically, or by crowds of people in rave outfits with drinks the color of glow-sticks. It was whenever I wasn’t with Helen, or knew I wasn’t going to be with Helen, which was quite a lot. Helen didn’t like to stay the night.

We almost only saw each other after dark and, other than the nights at the marina, strictly behind the closed doors of my bedroom, which I found sort of sad. In daylight, the single-hung windows of my dorm would catch the sun from all its angles. The few times we spent afternoons together, Helen would wear her thinnest, whitest dresses and dance in the swaths of sunshine about my floor. She would stand over my knee as I sat on the edge of my bed and lift the hems up and hold them with her teeth. She’d have me touch her. Often, she reminded me that her name, in Greek, meant bright light, or flash, or something.

Otherwise, she’d come over after her evening classes and we’d watch Baz Luhrmann films and make love on my twin bed in the underwater lighting, the swimming blue shadows from the tube TV on my hutch. After we were done, I’d roll over into the crook of the wall and listen to my heart palpitate while she checked her phone. I’d fear that I had just voided some essential part of myself. Sometimes I’d be okay. There were others when I’d trip into a regiment of deep breathing exercises I’d learned from a Youtube video of a poorly animated blue butterfly that fluttered its wings in time with my deep breaths against a backdrop of green hills and silvery rays from an invisible sun.

When that happened, Helen would do this other thing where she’d hover her open mouth over mine. It looked like she was trying to kiss me really hard, or swallow me whole and hide me inside her belly. But she always left a space between our lips where the hot air would flatten out and cool. I’d hear these soft clicks against her teeth, like there were little crystals in my breath that sparked cold along the faces of her molars, which were perfectly aligned because she kept them in her retainers whenever she was alone. The breathing exercises only worked, really, when she did that other thing.

Each night, before she got dressed and went home, we’d watch the rusted reflections of the city below us shimmer on the ocean from the concrete slab of my windowsill.

“We could be good together,” I’d tell her. 

The sill was cold against our bare thighs, so most times Helen would climb atop my lap and lounge into me. She’d let the back of her hand fall against the glass. It would leave blurred knuckleprints there, streaked along the pane. I’d wipe them clean whenever she didn’t text me back.

“It looks like it’s on fire,” she’d say. “The water—isn’t it something?”

Kingston Days

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by Eric Beebe

kingston days 2012

Until I turned eighteen, my hometown of Kingston, New Hampshire seemed like the only place I’d ever want to call home. Its center is branded by a stretch of plains broken only by small byroads. The plains are lined with maples within and Colonial houses without. Bells ring on the hour from down the street at the Kingston Congregational Church, but Kingston’s iconic Church on the Plains has no more denomination than Depot Road’s cruciform telephone poles. My parents married in that church and have since dedicated countless fundraisers and committee meetings to keeping it restored.

The town still asserts itself as a somewhere in the middle of the nowhere. It’s hard to drive a mile without finding a sign harkening back to the time when Kingston was known beyond its trees as “Carriage Towne.” Transportation is no longer the town specialty, but retention could be. Kingston breeds mostly two kinds: those who found it the perfect town in which to grow up and never want to leave, and those less keen on the thought of staying that will never have much choice.

I was one of the former until I experienced Kraków’s market square when I volunteered in Poland the summer before college, and later witnessed the metropolitan rush of Montreal on a weekend with my dad at twenty. Now I’m racing to move somewhere with even a fraction of their sidewalk bustle, with anything to do after ten besides window-shopping at Wal-Mart.

The most exciting thing in Kingston is an annual festival on the plains called “Kingston Days,” where all the townies can gather and act like everyone really does know everyone. When I went as a kid, I’d climb the steps of the town’s old, retired bandstand and sit with the kids who starting smoking cigarettes in middle school and the high school stoners. I’d linger in hopes the kid who’d asked his mom’s permission to swear with friends in fifth grade could be a badass too if he just stayed long enough. Some of the badasses went on to get arrested in opiate rings, some to be parents, some to work, and some to go to college. None of that was far off from the kids at school that didn’t belong on the bandstand. I didn’t know where I belonged, but maybe they did. All I knew was where we were: some worn-out gazebo with chipping white paint and splintered seats, central to a town I thought I’d always call home.

I used to look forward to Kingston Days, they being the only three days of the year I could walk down the street and see anyone the town had to offer for company. We’d all gather at the elementary school on the first night of the event for fireworks. People would bring blankets and claim their own little patch of the field beside the playground, and we’d try to find our friends under the bursts of light overhead. The same faces just aren’t there these days, not even among the ubiquitous daytime market stands and games. The family friend who ran the strongman bell every year died last fall in a plane crash, and I haven’t seen my old rival from the pie-eating contest since I took the title of “Pie King” from him a few years back.

The last couple years, I’ve had to convince myself more and more to be bothered with defending that designation. Each time, I sit down at the competitors’ table with the King’s Crown: a bandana with a paper pie glued to its front. I shove my face into a disposable plate of chocolate pudding and whipped cream and slurp it up like an old vacuum before I stop to look at anyone else. I collect the First Place ribbon. Mom insists on pictures. I clean off and hand her my prize because, frankly, the memento means more to her than to me.

When it’s all over, I trickle out of the Days with the rest, like blood from the jugular of a slaughtered cow—probably Kingston’s spirit animal. I wonder to myself which make me sadder: the people who can’t make it out of this place or the ones who will never want to go anywhere else.

On Improving the Cinque Terre Coastline

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by Daniel Johnson

Cinque Terre is a cluster of five Italian seaside villages along the Ligurian Sea, where the air is a spray of salt and citrus. There are lemon orchards and small castles and hillside villages of clay and terracotta and cobblestone. Cacti cling to the sides of cliffs and purple flowers shaped like long bells line the rugged inland trails through each town’s foothills. Each morning, my two traveling companions and I hiked these trails to work off the previous night’s seafood dinner.

The days were dry. We often rested and watered at the summit of the first foothill, where my friend would gulp mineral seltzer and snap pictures of the coastline with her iPhone. It was always hot and the sky was bold and the sun burned everything, even the distant haze of the farthest beaches, to a certain degree of enchanted brightness that seemed worth capturing.

improved

At lunch, in the cool shade of alleyway cafés that smelled of white wine and shellfish, I would watch as she forgot about her food and filtered the shit out of her photos on Instagram. She would spend her entire primo piatto turning the blues of the horizon the color of Rob Lowe’s eyes. She took the lush greens of the hillside and lit them like lights on an Xbox. She grilled the clay of the terracotta roofing to a salmon pastel and blotted out the black specks of osprey because whatever. Her thumbs swiped the color wheel on her screen in mantid twitches between WhatsApp messages to her boyfriend in Boston.

The photos of the village are simultaneously reminiscent of 1970s Miami and modern candy counters. An orange film oversaturates the dwellings, as if they were drenched in Aperol spritzers and are perpetually sticky.

I’m not sure the Cinque Terre I’ll remember is the one that exists. It will be difficult, at least, to recall the skyline as a particular shade of blue. I imagine I'll remember it as all gradations of all colors in infinite pixelated flux.

**

One afternoon, the three of us took a boat southward to the harbor town of Porto Venere. We docked, and I broke off to explore on my own. I walked along the ramparts of an old stone watchtower at the western cliffs and bought a small model ship, made of cork and walnuts and newspaper, from an elderly Italian woman who crafted and sold them there. We exchanged some basic pleasantries and she said, or at least I think she said, I should go check out the statue of Mother Nature at the tower’s base.

This interpretation of Mother Nature cast her as rather homely, and whatever metal in which she was originally molded has faded to a sea-green patina. She sits somewhat hunched, with her hands crossed between her legs on the corner of a stone wall at the edge of the cliff. Her face is directed to the horizon beyond the sea. She’s turned her back on the provincial empire of Porto Venere, with all its trade and tourism, all the fishing boats along the docks and the cranes that still loom above the rooftops.

One gets the sense that it’s something terribly grave that burdens her. She slouches in what looks like defeat. It’s almost impossible, as a passerby, to meet her gaze without climbing over the cliff-side railing and risking the long fall to the jagged rocks below. But, if I had to guess, there’s abandon in those oxidized eyes, and probably some sadness, too.