Didi Wood's Pick:
"I love this way this opens from a tense scene on a crowded train into a desperate dream of escape."
The train stops at another station and the man pulls an unopened pack of cigarettes from his pocket. His hand shakes as he passes it to the girl. She says she already has cigarettes. He says yes, yes, he knows, but that her pack is almost empty. She says she has another in her bag.
But these are American, he insists.
His eyes bounce as he shifts his gaze from the girl to the old couple seated across from them under a sepia print of the Roman Forum. His eyes spin like the cellophane blades of a toy windmill as he glances at the other two passengers in the compartment — a middle-aged woman and a kid with a backpack who are both falling in and out of sleep. He looks back at the old couple, then again at the girl.
Please. Please, he says.
The girl, embarrassed for him, sets the pack of Marlboro on her lap. She pretends that she didn't understand, or that she didn't even notice perhaps, when he lightly traced his pinky across her palm before he left the pack there. Or that his hand now rests between them on the leather seat and his pinky, squirming about in the air, has finally caught the seam of her shorts.
She looks beyond the glass window of the compartment door to the impenetrable row of travelers — foreigners in t-shirts and shorts who grunt and groan and lean to the right when a new passenger tries to squeeze in from the left.
There's no room, someone shouts. Go to another car!
When the train jerks to a start, the unbroken row follows; it sways en masse as the train snakes its way through the Umbrian countryside on a summer day.
Delicately, with her thumb, she pulls down the small metal ashtray at the end of her armrest and presses herself into the corner of her seat. His hand, still resting between them, flinches at a snail's pace before the tips of his fingers work their way over to cup the hem of her shorts. He turns his hand over and his rough, thick palm scratches circles across her thigh.
She focuses in on the framed print of the Roman Forum. She skips across the Roman building blocks, over the feathery ink strokes, down the road to meet the women draped in white cloth, holding the hand of a child. She follows them on their way to the market, snuggling into that place she has dreamt of finding. She lights the last MS Leggere from her pack. The woman waits for her.
Have lunch with us, the woman says. Do you like juniper berries?
Yes, answers the girl.
And honey? The woman pulls the child closer and runs her hands over his shoulders.
I love juniper berries, says the girl. I love honey! And lets the Marlboro fall to the floor as she wraps her arms around the woman and cries.
L. J. Pike paints and lives with two dogs and two cats in a small house which is surrounded by a semi-lush garden part of the year.