The Station Where Lost Languages Wait

How it begins

The announcement used a word Mara had not heard since her mother died.

It meant something between hurry and come with me. No translation she had found carried the same impatience or affection.

She stopped on the stairs.

The station had been closed for thirty years.

Behind her, evening traffic moved along the new road. Ahead, a light burned beneath the platform canopy.

Mara had taken this route home because her retirement party had become more difficult than expected. Everyone had praised her ability to make other people understood. Nobody had asked which words she had stopped using herself.

At the foot of the stairs stood a man in an old railway uniform.

“Ticket?” he asked.

“I didn't know there was a service.”

“Most people don't.”

“What destination?”

He pointed to a board filled with names she could not read. Some resembled places. Others looked like the beginnings of sentences.

The familiar word sounded again.

Mara answered before deciding to.

The attendant's face softened.

“Platform two.”

She walked beneath the canopy. On a bench sat a woman humming over a shopping bag. Farther along, two men argued in a language Mara recognized only from recordings.

“What is this place?”

“Somewhere to wait,” the attendant said.

“For whom?”

He looked at her as though the answer were impolite.

A train arrived without wind or sound. Through its nearest window, Mara saw her mother's kitchen table. Not her mother. Just the table, covered in crumbs, with a dictionary propping up one uneven leg.

Mara's phone rang.

Her son asked whether she was coming to dinner.

She almost answered in the language they always used.

Instead, she said the old word.

He was silent.

“What does that mean?”

Mara looked at the open carriage door.

For years she had mistaken not knowing how to explain something for not being allowed to begin.

“Come with me,” she said. “Or perhaps, let's hurry slowly.”