I'll Tell You Later

Once a year, on the day summer ends, she goes down to an empty transfer station to catch the 4:17 first train. That train carried her home after night shifts the summer she was twenty, and the note she never handed over is still in her inside pocket. Eight years of riding it, and she has never once stayed on to the end of the line. For a few seconds as the train leaves the tunnel, low dawn light falls across a line she has always read as blank.