Hold your breath- Flash fiction story

By Terri Brotherston

The water is coming, and I have been screaming for an eternity.

The low levels are full, and the trains are still steaming through. They are standing on the platforms waiting for a train that will lead them nowhere.

The noise is excruciating, but the smoke intoxicating. Their heavy skirts and woollen suits will only pull them down.

I feel the non-existent sweat drip down my neck and pool in the folds. I am excited in a cruel way. I get to watch this from a first-person perspective with a cold, long past, perspiration.

They can hear it begin to build through the tunnels. I can too. I scream again for dramatic effect and know, in this repetitive nature, that nobody will glance my way. Predictably, they don’t.

All is as it was, has been and as it should. I smile and start to laugh maniacally as I have a thousand times over.

The ballast bed and top ballast-without drainage filled quickly with the flooding Clyde. Every day, I get to relive the flooding of Central Station. The screaming that loses its power in my own lungs begins to fill the air and I am content.

I watch the air sucked from their unsuspecting and panicked lungs. That poor lost engineer. I engineered it all.