From Hurried Ascensions
by Esi Noire
The tunnel gave way to open dark.
Not night, something deeper. A void shaped like rail lines, fractured and twisted. Track 9 hovered in pieces, rails floating mid-air, shattered ties blinking in and out of time.
The train had stopped short.
Rene stepped forward, but the ground wasn’t ground anymore. Beneath her feet, timelines flickered, snippets of moments from a hundred lost lives: a soldier blinking under desert sun, a seamstress pulling thread from her hair, a boy running with coal-smudged lungs toward a mother who wouldn’t live long enough to catch him.
“Don’t step wrong,” said a voice.
Rene turned. It was the man again, the one who’d spoken at the blade. But now he was limping, holding a lantern shaped like a broken clock.
“This is the place time folded in on itself,” he said. “Too many spirits trying to board at once. The track couldn’t hold them.”
She looked out across the collapse.
“How do we get across?”
“You remember them,” he said. “Not all by name. Just enough to lay planks.”
He handed her the lantern. It flickered once, then steadied.
One step.
Beneath her, a plank of light formed.
Another step.
More light.
Each memory that rose in her chest, each forgotten story she dared to feel, became footing. The more she walked, the more solid the path became.
Behind her, the train waited.
Ahead of her, a single light blinked on the other side of the void.
It pulsed in rhythm with her grandfather’s cough.
Wicked Grim Stories 
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