Storming the Castle
Matthew Dexter

He is a broken man living in a broken world. He steers the miniature train through the mall in Mexico, wears dusty overalls, a conductor’s hat, a red bandana around his neck. He is damaged goods. Children fill his compartments with laughter as he yanks the pull cord and listens to that whistle blast. Echoes in his ears, he drives fast, always hungry for something more, a world without borders, acceleration propels them, onward, weaving away from inebriated teens, eardrums ringing with ecstasy, serpentine with ease between elderly women, poverty-stricken invalids, idiots with iPods. He is the Casey Jones of Guadalajara.
"Ahora el Gringo viene,” salespeople say when they hear the distinctive whistle of madness flutter between sun burnt sadness and pure misery.
He waves and smiles and dreams of the foaming ocean while magic eats away at his caboose with avid enthusiasm. In his heart there is darkness—in the farthest corner there are spider webs where cicadas have shed their skins. Decades earlier he saved a suicidal man on the tracks; he lost four fingers and an eyelid in doing so. Now he lingers around those blind corners a little longer, slithers like a rattlesnake between fragments of his imagination and the labyrinth of his mind.
There’s more than coal behind those amber irises. In the bowels of his soul there’s golden hope he holds onto every moment when the train meanders slowly back into the station and he waits for two hundred pesos, knowing that the tracks will never be the same again. He dreams of the señorita he lost on foreign soil, rides that mine shaft to the bottom in darkness. Beyond the food court there is a kingdom of despair, but one day he will jump the moat, wrestle the crocodiles, decapitate the monarch, and make love to the queen.