Editors Note: Leon Wing’s poem is “genre reversing” as the writer puts it. “It is a very long one-line narrative or prose poem. It is a time reversing, or you could say, a time travelling piece which one can also read as flash fiction. Thus, genre-merging,” Leon explains. 

Before the rats picked at the blood and flesh on the fragments of her skull dotted all over the

rails, before her head got crushed and brain matter splattered all over, and shattered bones,

still with some flesh around them, flung everywhere on the rails, before some passengers in

the train were jerked off their seats when the train hit something solid and nearly derailed,

before the people waiting to get on screamed and some turned their heads away, before the

train couldn’t stop from running over her, before she fell off the edge onto the rails below,

before she looked out at the buildings beyond, where a little boy would witness from his

bedroom window a horrific sight that would traumatise him for days on end, before she

trudged up the stairways to the rail platform, before she got up the first landing, before going

up the dirty stairs, she slipped and fell, the bottom of her slipper catching onto some rotting

piece of fruit someone had spit out because he was duped into buying some old mushy piece

of produce, slipping and falling headlong onto the stairs, killing herself.

Cover image by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash