The train stops inside an orchard. Its branches pass through the carriage roof without breaking the glass. Apples hang among the reading lamps, each with a tiny patch of weather moving beneath its skin. You step onto a platform made of the wooden tables from your primary school. Beyond it, a woman in railway overalls is watering a sapling with tea. Her silver hair is cut short. Her name badge says Moth, though you suspect this was not the name she was born with. Engineer. Gardener when the line gets ideas above its station. Don't pick anything you aren't willing to remember. One apple smells of your father's coat drying beside a heater. Another carries the hot, dusty scent of the station on the last afternoon before the line closed. You remember being angry that day. Your father had promised the trains would return. He worked on the railway. You thought he should be able to arrange it. He brought you back every summer for a while. You grew older. The visits became embarrassing. At some point, without ever making a decision about it, you stopped going together. You tell Moth the story. She listens while tying a young branch to a support. Promises can be made honestly and still turn out to be wrong. Doesn't make the disappointment imaginary. Doesn't mean the person making them knew how to be larger than the world. You do not eat an apple. Remembering is enough. You help her lift the watering can instead. At the edge of the orchard, every tree is growing the same unripe fruit. Moth breaks one open. Its centre contains a minute hand, ticking against the seeds. There it is again. One minute missing everywhere. We can mend a wheel. We can't force somebody to be ready for morning. She looks toward the carriage in which Nell vanished, then puts the broken apple gently in the compost.
A midnight train has lost its final minute. Follow a silver fox through impossible stations, and find your own way to morning.
Listen closely. Choose carefully. Carry the consequences.
Every path leaves a different story.