Sentence Starter #11: Four Travelers

[VerseD]

Sentence starters (http://www.colonyofgamers.com/cogforums/tags.php?tag=sentence+starter) are a fairly simple concept. I'll post a sentence. You write everything that follows that sentence. That's it. It's just flash fiction. Make it interesting. Make it compelling. Make it yours.

Here is a more descriptive sentence than the last one. Three characters are all you need, or maybe they're united on the same purpose, or they hold some conversation together, as they did in the Tolstoy novella which these sentences begin.

Travelers left and entered our car at every stopping of the train. Three persons, however, remained, bound, like myself, for the farthest station.

[National Kato]

Travelers left and entered our car at every stopping of the train. Three persons, however, remained, bound, like myself, for the farthest station. Thomas lit up another clove cigarette with the strike-anywhere matches he'd been so proud of since discovering them in Lyon. A wide smile splayed across his face as I raised my eyebrows to his flagrant disobedience of the 'No Smoking' sticker stuck on the very window he had slid open beside him.

"They're French, by god," he said, blowing a pale stream of smoke out into the rushing wind. "It's in their blood. 'Cigarette' is a French word. 'Nicotine' was coined from Jean Nicot, the French diplomat who introduced the plant to his countrymen back in the day. Charriere smoked Gauloises while incarcerated in Caen. You might know his story by way of his nickname, Papillon." Thomas took another deep drag, pinky finger conspicuously extended.

"That's very enlightening, monsieur," I said. "I hope you can relay that same colorful dialogue in French when the gendarme is ushering us off at the next stop."

Thomas rolled his eyes at me as Erick bounced back breathlessly into our cabin. "Oh look, our lovestruck accomplice returns."

With a dramatic glare towards Thomas, the young turk dropped into the seat next to me. He produced two cans of Kronenbourg from his suit jacket pocket and handed one to me. It was still cold, sweat beading up on the lip of the can. The other he cracked open for himself, quickly sucking the foamy head in as it rose up from the open lid.

"Hey, where's mine?" Thomas fussed.

"Mademoiselle only had two," Erick replied, ignoring Thomas and turning to me. He lifted his right arm and let his jacket sleeve slip down his forearm, exposing his tan wrist and the unmistakable blue ink script of a woman's phone number. "A kiss for a can, she said."

"You should've kissed her again," Thomas grumbled.

“What good is that going to do you in Chamonix?" I cracked open my beer and sipped slowly.

Erick let his arm drop, the number retreating secretly into the black sleeve once again. "She's getting off with us."

"Oh, hell no," Thomas said. "This is our con. No Yokos. We agreed."

"Relax, Tom," Erick said. "She was getting off there anyway. But think, we could use her. Local girl, speaks the language, knows the lay of the land, totally enamored with me?”

Thomas gave me a disapproving look. It never bode well when Erick set his mind on something, especially when that something was a woman. He did have a point, however. We could use a local who knew her way around. I shrugged at Thomas.

“Ah, Christ,” he said, flicking his cigarette irritably out the window.

Suddenly, it was all starting to look a lot more complicated.


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My first draft of this was over 700 words long. I really had some cool ideas and backstories to play about with these characters. Alas, I prefer to keep things short for these sentence starters. So, the ending is sudden and I'm not entirely happy with it, but it is what it is.

[VerseD]

I like it! I could only come up with this desperate struggle:

Travelers left and entered our car at every stopping of the train. Three persons, however, remained, bound, like myself, for the farthest station.

A young couple sat both looking out the same window at the same speeding scene of telephone poles and cars going their own ways into the middle of nowhere. Once he got up to buy sandwiches for them from the food car, and the blonde girl ate hers with a kind of uplifting warmth that showed that she was pregnant. Three rows behind them and on the other side of the aisle sat a man who spent the first half of the journey burrowed into his coat, and then, with a surreptitious gulp from some hidden flask, he revealed his old unshaven face, his flinty eyes, and a lugubrious droop to his lower lip.

I sat far removed from them, facing them from the other end of the car, but as the crowded spaces between us cleared away, with the latening of the hour and the incarnadined dwindling of the sunset, a sort of binding clarity emerged between the four of us, a realization of our destined unity, dawning at about the same time as the florescent lights—and with that realization, an opening toward a hello.

I thought that I might make the attempt, for I was used to approaching strangers. A long and turgid acquaintance with loneliness, as a friendless and kinless kind of far-flung dilettante, had driven me, after a long-endured solitude, to a desperate grasping toward company of any sort and in the strangest situations, which had instilled in me, over a long course of ridiculous attempts that had inured me to embarrassment, an easy manner and a confident self-possession, as well as a kind of stoic grace, as in one who has traveled the world. It came naturally to me to say hello and extend a hand to a stranger.

And so here, in that outbound carriage, around 9 o’clock, when we were the only ones remaining, I rose from behind the barricade of the seat in front of me, to extend the olive branch to my three fellow passengers.

They saw my intent in the way I looked at them as I walked down the florescent-lit aisle, in the way I smiled as I met their curious, then cautious, then skittish glances, that at once veered away with the fleetness of a doe caught in a glade. I was undeterred. I stopped at the row before the couple, taking in those two and the old man in the coat in my sweeping and good-humored glance, showing the guileless courage of a lion woken from a nap.

“Well,” I said, “it looks like we’re all in this together. There’s no reason to remain strangers,” and I gave them my name and awaited a reply. I looked from man to man to woman, and smiled eagerly, as if to say, “Why aren’t we seated together? Think of all we might learn. Maybe we are meant for each other! True companions, and here is where we meet.”

The man immediately before me continued to look toward the window with a straight and ready posture, with his hands crossed protectively in his lap, his hat shading his eyes. His pregnant wife smiled emptily, with too many teeth, before glancing out at the darkness of the window pane, still grinning with her lips, as if she had only imagined my greeting. The old vagrant, three rows back and halfway drunk, hung his heavy lower lip in an imbecilic gesture of surprise. He did not look away, but he did cower beneath his rank coat, pulling it up over his mouth and his hook nose, so that only the obsidian flakes of his eyes looked out between the collar and the white hair of his brow.

A failure—a complete failure, with not one word in response. I was a specter, a ghost, ethereal—had they even heard me? With the bow of a gentleman, as if they were looking, I turned back to my seat in the forward part of the car: dismayed, disheartened, and alone.