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The train is full of thirty smokers from the same school who get off to sticky cigarettes at each stop. They stand in bunches and pass colds, unfiltered, through their dry lips clockwise. Mostly they skip Matt because he is too eager with his two hands out of his pockets in the cold terminal and a fat pursed mouth.
Back inside Milo crowds Merris into the porta-bathroom with the bulk of his rough, pink body. He unzips his pants and put his lips on her eyebrow and then on her papery lid. Underneath her eye is moving wildly.
“I’m not gonna give you a blow job.” She laughs until she chokes on her tongue.
“Okay. I just wanna touch your boobs.” She is happy she’s worn her button-less button-up shirt. As they kiss she tries fitting her frame to his but their bodies resist, like steel drums.
“Only you,” he spouts. Merris wants to be a dentist to own a set of those metal scrapers. She likes the feel and sound of them on her teeth. She likes also the idea of her patrons fantasizing about the breasts bent over them, her breath warm inside the blue mask, and her scented fingers touching their tongues. Milo wants to drive tractors because he likes to feel the seat bouncing under his thick legs and also having his ears muffed. Merris grows up to be a horseback rider in the circus who wears small glimmering tops and Milo is killed in a terrible tractor accident tomorrow. End of story.

Penelope stumbles down the isle but still looks like she is dancing. Brandon decides it is just the way her body is made. Even when she is lying beneath him he feels like he is floating in water. She is obviously held together by currents because when he touches her neck her whole body ripples. He wants them to make love together but is scared of washing away.
“I hate you a whole lot. You love me until I want to hit you, so why aren’t you fucking me?” she’ll mouth once they are a thousand miles from the train and walking fast. She’ll say with a concerned laying on of the hands “I’m just not right for you. You deserve someone who can give you more.” Not too many steps later she’ll cut off her hair with gardening sheers and plant it by accident in the greenhouse, next to the kale. Her skin will erupt but everyone still loves her for her lucid jazz syllables and her watermelon hips. Brandon gets invited to a sauna party and blown by a beautiful funny girl with a face like a man. We all still pretty much hate him for being so boring. I just can’t understand a boy that can write a poem about the history of pigeons. All I can think is that they look like gasoline as they rest in the sun.

Arnie has his mouth open against Milly’s left shoulder and his breath has made a warm wet ring on her. Earlier today she’d wanted to see New York out the window so he told her to blow and her breath would heat the frost. When it didn’t work he said that really he’d just wanted to see her face as she huffed a pathway across the skyline. Now, every time the train jolts Arnie gasps and Milly’s shirt sucks between his swollen lips, like aged pale fruit. Before she was falling asleep he said to her fly on, my little wing. Milly can’t stand this because she will never love him and she was saving that line for her funeral not for this train ride, spoken through parched lips with a kind of hope that makes her stomach hurt.
He finally wakes up when people are talking about animals and he says “No, you know the best animal is the sea otter. How they just dip and go down in the ocean and get a mussel and crack it open on their chest. Otters are so happy.”
“Arnie you’re right!” Glorie shouts, rubbing her eyes.
“Glorie, can we be otters together?” Milly presses her face hard onto the glass to keep from getting sick. At some point the heat from his mouth spread virally over her body.
“Sea Otters forever!” Glorie says, smiling. At once she loves Glorie so much, and pictures the three of them bobbing up and down with salt in their whiskers then warming their spiked fur by lying together on a rock. She puts her feet carefully in Arnie’s lap and pretends to be asleep. Twenty years later and a week after I’m a bridesmaid in Arnie’s wedding he jumps from a skyscraper, the wind making him cry and his trench coat flapping. Glorie contracts HIV but outlives us all by about 8 years. On her hundred and third birthday she receives a birthday ball spiraled with 103 gifts that takes her two months to unravel. I think the exhaustion from unwrapping that ball is really what killed her. Milly joins the Mormon Church on a bet and converts more people than anyone dreamed possible. I, however, remain unsaved.

“Hey honey,” Laina squeals, glimpsing Winona in the car to her right. Her friend takes her by surprise, like a flash from a mirror when the sun catches it and you wonder if theirs a code somewhere in the burst of light. She throws open the door and pounces.
“Hey there,” squeals Winona, wiping lipstick off her cheeks. She squeezes Laina’s knee with wide knuckled fingers.
“Oh my god, how was your audition?”
“It was really good, I think so anyway. The monologues were even better than my voice. Everyone there was really talented. You could hear them from the hallways, like la lalalalalala. But oh my god! I haven’t told you yet. Guess what, can you guess?”
“Welllll…Is it…did you?” She squints her eyes and leans far forward. Laina’s been taking shots on the car over and wants Winona to smell the sweetness of her breath.
“Yes!” she sings. The man reading beside her glances at them sideways and then backs down because Winona is very beautiful and has a very broad back.
“You know what this means, don’t you?”
“Sex party!”
“Then we can find more things that taste like, ummm…” she laughs heartily and loses eye contact with her friend. A crack in her laugh makes the man flinch, like music skipping. She raises her voice a little louder.
“More things that taste like cum.”
Winona is the first red head to win a nobel prize and Laina becomes infamous due to a highly publicized nude centerfold spread. Winona is grateful for the dirty magazine and keeps it on her coffee table where it serves as an appealing conversation starter.

When Lynn meets the old man on her way to the bathroom, she can just manage to nod at his dandelion head. I know someday a man will trace the blue green beneath her knuckles, their hands guided by veins running through a body that feels like home. She likes older men because they remind her of thick shaving cream, horsehair brushes, and cutthroat razors. How gentle their heads look pressed into the pillow, as fallen and sweet as a coconut. She feels these things are fundamentally hers. When she finds an old man she mentally puts them in the same pair of plaid blue flannel pants in front of a stove, making eggs. Her favorites are Peter Jennings (western omelet), Christopher Reeves (deviled), and Michael Kane (soft boiled). She also thinks about Roger, the way his sweat smells like spicy pine and how he smiles at her with a mouth full of teeth like puzzle pieces. She loves the way his face looks like it is coming apart when he talks about his wife and how when he’s nervous his hands shake because, when the time came, it would seem so honest.

I had been dreaming about thieves taking our train hostage, and then forcing me at gunpoint to kiss, systematically, across his head. I have this afterimage like I’ve looked at the sun for too long of my back bent low over his seat, my fingers resting in his cup holder and my teeth in his hair. In the dream I couldn’t stop smiling.
Sometimes, when he talks, I like to be close enough to notice his breath, because if I can love even that about him then what is left to not love? Nothing is left. I like to concentrate on one part of his skin, a little freckle near his collarbone or a wrinkle on his broad white forehead, and put all the love I have into that wrinkle until I could cry about it. Because it’s running through him. He makes my veins feel like they’re bursting. I’ll be talking about drugs or parents, gasoline, chord progressions, and thinking, isn’t the feeling of our stomachs flat against each other something you want to know? I can understand why boys kiss with so much tongue, because I want to be as far inside his mouth as space will allow. This love is a love that makes me cry with my mouth open wide, like I’m smiling. This is a howling, cutting love that makes me fantasize not only about his body, but his insides, fabricated nights of drunkenness and old movies, years lived in a scenario where I wear, sometimes, his oversized shirts. I think the way he smells has moved something inside my head.
See, I can create a thousand couples in my head that have it worse, but at least they have something. In the end I pack them into sacks until I can’t remember the lines of their faces. Penelope, or Lynn, Roger, Jerald, Mcdougal, it doesn’t matter, they stack together like checkers. They blow away like pieces of string. The tracks tick me to somewhere far from ten thirty nine at night with my nose so stuffy it feels like it’s been broken. Every love I have known is him and me, just his face collapsing under the huge rotating tractor wheels, my face, emotionless over Merris’s swaying breasts. But now it is just us, the final story and the most simple and sad. Ultimately the only story I can tell. We’re facing each other in the seats, jolting through tunnels and as isolated as deep sea divers.