The Journey

By Cleve Sylcox

This is a short story about Walter, a drifter, a hobo, a railroad bum who left his home because he was haunted by the memories of the departed wife and son. He could not stand to live without them and took to the rail in an attempt to run away. But he found you can't out run a memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cleve Sylcox
• Release date: Oct 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519910226

Book preview

The Journey

Snow fell from billowing clouds on hard winds gusting to twenty miles per hour and at times forty. A blizzard on Christmas Eve. Whiteout conditions stretched from the deep valleys and mountain ranges in the south to the upper plateaus some two hundred miles north. Travel was limited to emergency vehicles. No one wanted to be out in these conditions if they could help it. Most stayed at home but others had no choice. The homeless; the lost; those running from home; fugitives, and then there were those that chose a lifestyle of wandering.

Walter was all the above. He left home voluntarily with no direction or want to be anywhere. His mind twisted and confused from loss and he ran from something he denied existed. A fugitive, running from a past, which chased him and caught him as he slept.

Wind swirled powdery snow across Highway Three. The days felt as if they would last forever; long hours of walking with rags wrapped around frozen fingertips and an occasional rest beneath railroad bridges or the hurried steps to catch a train. Hours of plodding along on feet so sore, only God himself knows the pain.

Walter sat to rest.

He wants to take off his heavy boots and rub his sore cold toes, eat more than a morsel of food, and feel warmth all around him. For years...long tiring years, the road pulled him forward. Where he was going he never knew or cared, as long as it was far away from where he came.

As days rolled into years, he wandered the rails in search of something. A new