What am I Doing Here?

Night Train is an online literary magazine that began as a biannual print journal in 2002. Since Issue VII it has been published online on a biannual basis, despite the fact the site says quarterly. A blog on the homepage features news and weekly updates of Firebox fiction—short stories of less than 1,500 words.

Issue 9.2 was published in September of 2009 and contains the work of 12 poets as well as 9 short stories. The site is clean and easily navigable with serif text that’s large enough to hold off computer-induced eyestrain for a time. It still may take some getting used to for those not accustomed to long intervals spent looking at a computer screen.

There is an unstated, but clearly evident, theme running through many of the short stories. Several follow protagonists on the outskirts of society, marginal characters who are remarkably aware of their situations. Daniel Crocker’s “Two Months Before, Two Months After” is one of the most obvious. The central character, Chip, loses his penis in the opening scene and, despite the severity of such a happening, Crocker’s tone is nonchalant, leaving the reader uncomfortably sharing in Chip’s shock:

                        The dog bit down, bit again, and pulled his head away

                         with a snap. Where Chip's penis had been, flaccid and

                        splotchy, there was only blood. It splashed upon the olive

                        curtains and pooled sloppily upon the painted flaked 

                        windowsill.

From there the story goes two months before and then two months after the event, painting a picture of a man stripped of all that is commonly held as masculine: he can’t pleasure his wife, he’s obsessed with a computer role playing game, and, most obviously, he doesn’t have a penis. Chip leaves his wife when she is no longer interested in having sex with his strap-on and moves in with the fellow gamer he had been having an affair with. The story ends with a most telling inversion of stereotypical masculinity: his girlfriend enters the room with a latex glove and a bottle of baby oil.

Bonnie ZoBell’s “Sea Life” chronicles the Steppenwolf-like journey of Sean, a recent college graduate ambivalent about entering the adult world of careers and commitment:

                        Once he gets a job, what matters to him will be irrelevant.

                        He will work the next 60 years of his life, the next 21,900

                        days, the next 31,536,000 minutes, driving bleak freeways,

                        wearing stiff clothes.

His feelings toward his girlfriend mirror this reluctance, “Something might die inside if he can't see beyond the habit of life, if he can't see some kind of shimmer out there.” The domesticity of a steady relationship is just as off-putting to Sean as a life of soulless toil.