Alice Schell

As a fiction writer I am grateful for the gift of imagination. It has the power to transform and give meaning to experience and memory. It is the inexhaustible source of the love, empathy, sorrow, or outrage I feel for my characters. And it is the one sure antidote to artistic complacency.
 

I listen to the freight train as it rattles over the grade crossing at Waterman Street, and I see that long-silent other train: my mother, taking her time as she approaches the tracks, looking up from the laundry basket she carries in time to see the train bearing down on her, blotting out the sky. The face that hovers in my dreams is not startled by the black onrushing engine.

Sometimes I see her without the laundry basket -- there never was a laundry basket -- and she is waiting in an attitude of tension, ready to spring. She runs alongside the train as it slows down at the grade crossing; she reaches up for a handhold on one of the boxcars where a hobo stares from the darkness, astonished at the sight of an old woman stumbling in the snow without a coat, her ungloved hand thrust up like a black flag in the white wind.

- from Family Memory, a novella in progress