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Southwest Chief

Southwest Chief

Meeting the fourteen words

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Isaac Simpson
Dec 13, 2024
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This really happened in 2015

“You’re pretty,” she says.

I frown like a stroke victim.

“Don’t worry. I don’t mean it as a compliment.”

Four of us in the glass-paneled observation car of an Amtrak train somewhere in the middle of Kansas. It’s dark outside, just beginning to drizzle. Forty-eight hours from origin to terminus. We’re about half way.

Condoms cocaine cookies, sins come in little plastic packages that get strewn around as reminders once they’re spent. Down some stairs, the little stainless steel galley café is dotted with a colorful array of delectable goybites and goysnacks. I procured all of its gins and scotches before it closed, but it’s not enough. That was three hours ago and it won’t re-open until six.

Strangers, battling the hours, squeezed into this tiny plastic booth, the sides of our thighs touching, drunk, but out of booze, hurtling through landscapes nobody’s ever heard of at somewhere between 110 and 140 miles per hour, hurtling towards sobriety even faster.

In front …

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