We had heard that the train went underwater but we weren’t sure what to expect. The beginning of the journey was what we were used to: city giving way to suburbs and then to long stretches of flat fields and white windmills, turning slowly and out of sync. Gridded allotment gardens hugging train tracks, empty and in bloom. Eventually there was a long stretch of darkness like a tunnel, and the train came to a stop. The conductors told everyone to get off and when we did we found ourselves in the belly of a ferry, walking in single file in the narrow space between the train and the parking garage wall.

Upstairs almost everything was white, a bit sterile. We joked that this was our new post-apocalyptic reality, the world had ended in environmental collapse and all who remained now lived on this boat, subsisting on Toblerone and fizzy water. Like Snowpiercer except our train was parked under our feet and we could mill about on the ferry deck and smell the salty air and watch the light glint off the deep blue water, which stretched out around us infinitely in all directions, not a spot of land in sight.


✦˖°.

݁₊✦˙ .