A Monster Worth Missing the Last Train For

How it begins

The last train had four minutes before departure when the monster asked whether wings counted as luggage.

Above them, the station clock advanced with an indifference neither passenger nor inspector could reasonably be expected to admire.

Esme Solano looked up from her inspection sheet.

He stood beneath the station clock, folding himself carefully away from the gas lamps. Rain shone along the dark membranes of his wings. In one enormous hand, he held a ticket so old its edges had turned soft.

"That depends," Esme said. "Do they detach?"

"Not willingly."

"Then no."

He smiled. It showed more teeth than most railway passengers preferred to acknowledge.

Behind him, the porter had stopped moving a trunk. On the platform, a woman drew her coat closer, though the evening was not especially cold.

Esme took the ticket. The destination was printed in a typeface the railway hadn't used for a century.

"This service no longer stops there."

"I know. I've been asking for ninety-three years."

The train gave its first impatient hiss.

Esme glanced at the border lamp beside the tracks. Green for the city. Amber for the woods. Between them, a strip of darkness no timetable admitted was a place.

"What changed tonight?" she asked.

The monster looked toward the carriages. Through one lit window, a child was showing her father a paper bird.

"Nothing," he said. "I was hoping something might."

Esme had inspected trains for twenty-one years. She knew the sound of a loose fitting, the particular silence before a complaint, the exact weight of the watch in her pocket. She had begun to suspect she also knew the shape of the rest of her life.

She handed back his ticket.

"Your name?"

"Owen Hale."

Esme turned toward the guard.

"Hold departure."

The guard stared. Owen did not move.

"Only while we talk," she told them both. "But properly, this time."