Freight docking

At the meeting of many rails, in air so cold that sound travels for miles down the tracks, one engine abandons freight and pushes it into the care of another. Energy shoots through the metal cars, a thunderclap chain reaction at a speed that belies their lumbering appearance and slow starts. Humans made trains for their own small-minded purposes—to move gold and wood, to avoid the menace of stillness—but the sound effects are divine.

Sunday morning

They're singing and speaking all the same words and outside trains pass, sound like cannons, thunderclaps, giants clanking armor. They're blessing a little girl, pouring warm water over her ears and smearing oil over her brow and through the window bums do a Sunday morning stumble as sunshine burns off the last alcohol. They're biting at the bread of life and sipping together their spiritual drink in the old white building unremarkable off Toole Street, unrecognizable as churchly, dedicated, even inhabited. The trains and the prayers disperse, as afterwards do the people, mingling with the sun and the bums, in the middle of it, smiling and trying and fallible and real.