WORD OF THE METHADONE SPRING SPREADS FAST,

despite its botched delivery. Soon national stations are running the story, first in sign language, then out loud.

The  ULTRA MAX oil aisle sells out, everyone thinking this must be where the road to forgetting what they’ve learned begins. People even buy vinegar. The naked man is shunted into the shellfish freezer.

IN THE REST OF THE COUNTRY,

everyone knows and some people are doing something about it. Especially Clarion Maria, longterm captain of a two-car ghost train.

She first boarded the ghost train, which generates its own track as it goes, on her twenty-first birthday, the day she lost what had until then been her home, and hasn’t stopped plying the nation’s interior in it since.

Her thing is cathedrals, Romanesque. She builds them on credit cards, which she serially opens and closes, better than most at not worrying about the frequent flyer miles lost in between.

Each town she passes through has a cathedral of hers, or part of one, however much she manages to put up before her credit is sundered.

She used to liaise with the heaviest drinker in each town for an hour in a chain accommodation of his choosing, but when she turned thirty-one she was given an oxblood dildo system as a bonus for opening an account with an upstart credit card company out of Des Moines, designed to inflate with the fresh blood of one ox per town. The ox is stored behind a glass partition in the ghost train and hooked up through a tube running from its heart, which Clarion Maria is free to inflate at the turn of a nozzle until the beast runs dry, the result being that her mind is now uncluttered by strangers and she never has to smell the lobby of an EconoLodge again.
The crew holds back its opinions on this front, except when she sends them out for oxen, which can be tough to find and even tougher to install, and there’s the issue of disposing of the used ones, often not quite dead but too dry to eat. 

The ghost train roams a grid of six states, spending months at a time underground in search of rare earth metals to supplement Clarion Maria’s increasingly strained credit lines, but she has yet to strike upon any worth more than what they cost to extract.

SO SHE TAKES NEWS OF THE METHADONE SPRING AS A GODSEND.
she says, through the partition between her car and the crew’s. She knows she doesn’t need to finish the thought, so she doesn’t.

She looks at her hand, imagines the camera zooming in on it as she holds up a methadone bottle on live TV, explaining its uses and pricing. Then she looks at her other hand, wonders which one it will be when the time comes.


This vision loops back to the older, central one, which she’s pursued all of her adult life and believes is now close to fruition: It came in a dream when she was eleven. Having learned to fly while passing through a 17th century Swedish village, she ran up the highest structure she could find, planning to jump out and soar, but the villagers clamored after her when they saw what she could do, as if to squeeze her dreaming out, and she was trapped in what turned out to be a mere two-story churchtower, trying to get out while they huffed up the stairs bearing torches, but the window was stained glass and wouldn’t open and suddenly neither her ability to fly nor her (probable) inability to die did her much good, and her mind got wrenched into a middle zone close to waking where she felt her body aging much faster than was safe, and in this middle zone – looking through the stained glass – she saw an immense cathedral looming over the town, its foundation covering a full acre, and she understood that a spring fed into the baptismal font in this cathedral, and that if she could bathe in that font, every misstep of her previous life would be forgiven and the right path would be revealed, and no longer would there be the smoky circle of doubt around everything she did except sleep.

WHEN SHE WOKE UP

she was twenty-one, clinging to the promise that those lost years would be restored upon bathing in the font in the cathedral she would first have to build.

That was the morning she left her home and boarded the ghost train, waiting outside, with a crew that claimed to’ve been doing nothing until then.

THE GHOST TRAIN

chugs behind ULTRA MAX and through Culvert City to enter the Cave where the methadone river is fresh and deep.

Chester, the Cannibal King is sitting on a lawn chair, placid enough to look like he’s been expecting them.

The train crashes into the wax idol, crushing it and gumming up its wheels badly enough that it has to stop.

Clarion Maria climbs out as Chester stands up to greet her. 
 she says. 

Chester smiles like nothing explicable can surprise him. Cannibal Children emerge from the shadows, skinny from lack of recent meat, eyeing the new arrivals with minimal respect.

As they close in, Clarion Maria returns in her mind to that two-story 17th century Swedish chapel and looks through the stained glass at the vision of the cathedral across town, the best years of her life bobbing in its baptismal font like apples waiting to be speared by her teeth and chewed one by one.

Far inside the vision, she barely hears the screams of her crew as the Cannibal Children go for their best parts first.
Offered the left cheek of her first lieutenant, she considers asking if she can wrap it up for later, but thinks better of it, pinching her nose to swallow it down like a wet herring.