Flash Fiction 2nd Place: The Train to Anywhere But Here by Catherine Ogston

I’m taking the train to the Moon, the bottom of the ocean, the top of Everest and Sam says no you’re not cos trains don’t do that, they stay on tracks, joined to land but I tell him what do you know, you’re just a baby who still needs a teddy at night and we both pretend that I don’t as he leaves the room so I can carry on building my cardboard carriages and when it’s finished I sit in the front being the driver and I drive that train with its clickety clackety motion and its shrill piercing whistle and its engine that eats mouthfuls of coal and belches out columns of sooty smoke and there I stay all day, pretending not to hear Mum’s call to tidy it up and not even flinching when  Dad arrives home and stares at me sitting there, giving the boxes a thumping kick as he walks past on the way to the kitchen, and when I hear the raised voices and the tension simmering in the air and the smash of a plate on the floor I keep on steering my train and don’t even mind when Sam climbs in behind me, his bear tucked under one arm, and we let the chug chug chug of the locomotive drive us to Lapland to glide across glaciers and snake around snowbanks and we wave to Santa and throw carrots out the windows to his reindeer and then we travel south to that beach in Spain where everything had been sand and smiles and sunshine and then we speed across the ocean to a jungle where monkeys hang by their tails from trees and tropical flowers bloom like bright umbrellas and that’s where we stop, disembark and hide under leaves as large as shields and all we can hear is the drip drip plop of water from rain-showers and the buzzing of insects the size of your hand and the squawk of birds who fly overhead with wings like rainbows and when Sam says can we do this again tomorrow I tell him yes of course we can even though I know that most likely when we wake in the morning our cardboard train will be in a bonfire at the bottom of the garden, belching out a column of sooty smoke.