On a Train

Draft 2. In the interests of the development of contemporary literature I will add a Draft 3 later. Digital ink never dries.

   When hurriedly entering the carriage, the last man leaving the station saw that there was just one single seat still unoccupied. Every passenger in the train looked at the young man as he stepped toward the usually quickly filled highly prized empty (window) seat, and as he progressed through the rows he noted a few people giving him an unusual smile.

He sat down.

To anyone just making a quick observance of him, the man sitting in the seat next opposite was very obviously covered in distinctly far-right wing, politically-oriented tattoos.

Stretching from the nape of his neck and entirely across the full length of his carotid artery, there had been imprinted solid black bars of ink into his skin, the symbol used by the Nazis, and the particular signifying symbol of the historically noted to be the most determinedly 'anti-fun' division of all of Adolph Hitler's free and press-ganged army of sociopaths, that is the S.S.

The secret police arm of Hitler's henchmen, their symbol being the 'lightning bolt S.S.'

Many, and far better given and even more hideous descriptions flourish, in all forms of recorded history, regarding the sheer brutal cruelty, and inhuman lack of empathy for their fellow man, which was all too obvious in the physical out working of these Nazi madmens' natures. The memory of this militia, known as the S.S. or 'Secret Service' is written in the rivers of exploded metal, molten lead, blood, guts and the searing tears of men, women and children, in every corner of the earth, banked on each side by the mountainous mounds of hair shaved from millions of heads with the purpose of stuffing cushions, furniture and padding the cockpit seats of their fighter planes.

The shoes of every size and type including those designed for little feet yet having learned to walk were just there in a pile.

The mountainous mangles of eyeglasses struck from the faces of anyone that they flippantly deemed worthy of reducing to clouds of ash that, if spread into the blue summer sky altogether, the volume of which would be so great as to blot out the midday Sun and throw us all into darkness. Which was what the Nazis sought to do to all of the non-white inhabitants of the earth, and which they almost did, for a time.

That was, until they were fought to defeat by noble and triumphant victors, all of whom, in general political terms, sadly, and unexpectedly, within less than a century, would prove themselves equally and surpassingly as evil in every way.

The knowledge that the war against the Nazis had been won by the forebears of those sitting inside this train carriage today was thick in the atmosphere of the silence, and a few smirked as the passenger boarded the train and chose to walk to where the empty seat was and then to sit next to him, a man with short cropped, blonde hair and the very obvious SS lightning bolt tattoo impregnated upon his person.

He sat down, nodded a cursory acknowledgement to the tattoo covered man and then began looking out of the window for some unknown object in the distance.

These letters were the full length of the man's neck, and after the train left the station when he quickly turned away from the window to look at the man sitting opposite him, it became obvious that on the other side of this man's neck was the actual swastika!

That ancient mystical symbol of a far Eastern descent, appropriated by Adolph and forever tainted thereby with its association to him. Hitler was an occultist, apparently, with the Luciferian 'eye in the triangle', (same as the famous one on the US one dollar note), like a good luck horseshoe above a barn door, emblazoned in stone above the doorway to his bunker. This association to both witchcraft and its bow and worship type affiliation with the Devil quite clearly explain the otherwise insane seeming motivation for seeking to kill every single Hebrew person on the planet, which was Adolph's quite publicly stated goal.

This effort to destroy the 'chosen people of God' had more of a hidden agenda to it than purely a dislike of perceived economic imbalances which favored the Jewish people.

The man in the tattoos was also covered by a crisp, clean white shirt and this was the clue to the other man that the tattoos might be on some type of a retirement from their original intended purpose. His shirt was so clean that when the train rounded a portion of the road where the sunlight broke through that it seemed to radiate its own light.

"You're looking at the tatts, right?" asked the man with the tattoos, "It's a fair bet they're the first thing anyone sees, so don't be shocked I'm calling you out on that." he said, in a pleasant, friendly, yet resigned tone.

"Yeah, you're right, They're pretty full on. Why did you get them?"

The man in the white shirt was visibly relieved that he'd had a direct question on the matter.

"None of these people on here get it. I used to live in New Zealand and was heavily involved in the gangs over there. These," he said gently touching his neck, "were like war-paint between us whites and the Maori gangs. We got 'em done in order to antagonize them. Honestly, I never expected to live long enough for them to become an issue later on in life. I was sure I was gonna be dead. It's a miracle I survived."

"I didn't know there was such a violent cultural divide between the two groups." the young man said.

"Mate, it's not something they put in the tourist brochures, but it's pretty well known in NZ that there are street gangs that are ready to fight to the death. Not all the Maoris were too pleased with the white invasion, you see? Kept the invasion defense war going."

"Who could blame them?"

"We helped 'em do it. Most people see these, they won't even talk to me." he said, and the young man noted that beneath the man's ironically sparkling white shirt where he'd rolled the cuffs of the sleeves slightly up and back away from his wrists that there he wore a long sleeved white cotton undershirt that was woven from a cloth thicker than the average.

On the backs of each of his hands were knife-like spikes of black ink ending at a conspicuously slender blade tipped point just below the inside of where the cuticle covered each of his quite clean and well-kept finger nails.

He pointed to the swastika.

"I went to a laser tattoo removalist dermatologist, seven thousand."

He raised his right arm as they passed an old and disused station backed by clouds of sun lit gum trees.

"The back of this hand, six grand."

He shook his head as he lowered it and the listener also moved into a similarly secretive position in which to speak in lowered tones, much to the chagrin of the nearby eavesdropping passengers.

"I mean, I go into Centerlink to get a job and they just take one look at ya and start for the pension forms. But no, I won't do it. I can work," and then he sat back and spoke out loud as if to all listening,

"I can do anything under a skin that's really no different to anyone else's."

"Yes, well, that makes sense. I guess you'd get to feel how the Kooris get it?"

My oath mate, I'd hate to see what else we've done to them! Or haven't somehow got them to do to their selves."

They sat in silence awhile.

He pointed to his neck, and said with a detuned resignation,

"I just see these as scars now."

After this, the other passenger remained silent as outside the lines of building fronts broke into a non existent line of cars waiting behind a red and white barrier with red flashing lights on either side of them on the footpathed sides of the empty road.

"Are you off to Melbourne?" asked the non-tattooed, (but slightly scarred) passenger, in the spirit that anyone on a vehicle that is traveling for a long distance might question of the other traveling stranger passenger, that is, whether this next destination toward which they were both traveling was one which might lead on to some further, more distant destination or not?

"Yeah. Just been in Bendigo visiting my boy. I only get up there to see him on weekends, there's nothing up there in terms of work. His mother's from there though, so..."

The listening passenger had little to understand in relation to the family of which the man spoke but made the correct understanding sound.

"He was at the top of the slide," said the man, momentarily lifting his arms as though back in the park and gently holding his boy by the shoulder and back of the arm, to assure him that he was safe at the top of the ladder on the slide, and then he lowered his hands again, and the man's clear blue eyes flashed with determination,

"I told him, it's okay if you're scared. Being scared is okay, it's normal, you aren't weird if you're scared of something. So, you know, that he'd be okay? I made sure he understood the difference and then I also told him that it wasn't okay to be afraid though. You know?"

Something in the way the listening stranger had reacted in silence, distracted as he was by the green and blue blurred outlines of a partly observed window full of passing unfamiliar objects in the window of the train told the tattooed man that this man didn't know.

It was something that he would perhaps find out about some other how.

For the rest of the journey neither of the two men spoke of anything of substance, that was until the train pulled into the Spencer street station in Melbourne, and as it did, the first man, who'd entered to find he had simply and only one seating option, rose to leave the caboose and as he said his pleasant 'good bye', he rose and stepped away toward the exit doors, at which time the man with the unfortunate tattoos said, in an obviously very well-rehearsed manner, to him,

"There's one good thing about having tattoos like this. You're always assured of getting a seat on public transport!"

Author's Note

Why does a cut and paste always loose all of the paragraphical indentations?