Pretty Girls

Think about pretty girls. Think about pretty girls wearing long dresses and smoking cigarettes, nodding and laughing not too loudly. He did.

Albert Headly had no concept of space and time.

He understood the difference of here and there. He understood how time could so easily be used against him when he had something he wanted to do and he also had something he didn’t want to do but needed to do. He could not put these two, space and time, together.

Right now he needed to think about pretty girls in long dresses but wanted to be on a train to Philadelphia to stay with his friend from grade school long enough to find more money to go all the way home on the trains.

The long train rides would feel so relaxing. Thank God, as long as he wasn’t next to somebody vulgar. He didn’t mind sitting alone. Even more so, he didn’t mind sitting with a stranger.

It was a long train. Headly could get to know him. If he wouldn’t ask questions that weren’t dreadfully dull. This place was often so dull to Headly, but the trains were an exercise in the population’s potential for liveliness.

The trains were never beautiful. They never needed to be.