An elderly woman boards a train and slowly realizes the passengers look strangely familiar.

The elderly woman, whose name felt oddly distant even to herself, stepped onto the train platform and felt an immediate sense of displacement. The station itself was not her usual, clean commuter stop; it was old, smelling of coal dust and damp wood, lit by dim, amber gas lamps. The train waiting on the tracks was a magnificent antique, a string of heavy, dark green carriages with brass fixtures and velvet upholstery. It felt less like a vehicle and more like a carefully preserved museum piece, humming with a low, persistent energy.

She settled into a corner seat by the window, sinking into the plush, crimson velvet. She was weary, her body heavy with the fatigue of years, and the journey felt like an unexpected respite. As the train gave a long, mournful whistle and began to move, the world outside blurred—not with the speed of travel, but with a strange, shifting luminescence. The modern city outside the window dissolved, replaced by a landscape of rolling hills, fields of corn that grew impossibly tall, and glimpses of architecture that belonged to her childhood—houses with deep porches and gabled roofs she hadn’t seen in seventy years.

It was the passengers, however, that truly arrested her.

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