Frank Kowalski woke at five in the morning and got up and went to the window and looked out at the tracks.

The tracks were intact. All seven of them ran straight and grey into the darkness beyond the edge of his yard, and the one that mattered most—the branch line that led to the old Jones and Laughlin plant—was solid and unbroken and waiting for him the way it had been waiting for him every morning for three years.

He pulled on his work boots and his jacket and his hat and he went downstairs and he made coffee and he drank it from a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST GRANDPA and he put the mug in the sink and he walked out the door.

The air was cold and it smelled like rust.

He walked the half mile to the station in the dark, his boots crunching on the gravel beside the road, and at the station there was Old Ray, who was sitting on a bench under a streetlight that had been flickering since 1998. Old Ray was seventy-three and he had been the signalman on this branch line for forty-two years before the line closed and before the railroad company stopped sending anyone to check the signals and before Old Ray decided that checking them himself was the only thing left that made sense.

Morning, Frank, Old Ray said. He was talking to the darkness more than to Frank, which was his way.

Morning, Ray. Frank nodded at the tracks. Still there?

Still there. Old Ray pointed with his chin. You?

Still there.

They stood in silence for a moment, two men who had spent their entire working lives listening to trains and who now spent their entire non-working lives listening to the silence where the trains used to be.

Mouse was there too, curled up inside an abandoned freight car that had been sitting on a siding since the nineties. He was nineteen and he went by Mouse because he was small and quiet and moved through spaces the way a mouse moves through a wall—without anyone noticing. He was also from Philadelphia, though nobody asked him about Philadelphia and he never talked about it.

Frank left a loaf of bread on the bumper of Mouse's car. Mouse did not come out, but Frank knew that the bread would be gone by morning.

He walked to the end of the line. Three miles of track, past abandoned stations and broken signals and the skeletons of grain elevators and the rusted gates of a steel mill that had been closed since 2003. He walked past all of it without looking at it, because looking at it was a habit he had formed in the first year and had not yet broken and which he suspected he would not break in the second or the third or any of the years that followed.

At the steel mill, he stopped at the gate and he stood there for an hour and he looked at the building across the yard. It was a big building—long and low and made of brick and steel and the kind of industrial glass that turns grey in the afternoon and black at night. Inside it were furnaces and cranes and conveyor belts and thirty years of someone else's labour, all of it still there, sitting in the dark, waiting for a shift change that would never happen.

Frank stood at the gate for an hour because this was what he did. He went to the end of the line every morning and he stood at the gate of the mill and he waited for nothing in particular.

Then he turned around and he walked back.

The first morning, he walked back without thinking about anything. The second morning, he walked back thinking about the last twelve years, about how you could spend twelve years pouring molten steel into molds and how the molds were always the same and the steel was always the same temperature and the day was always the same length and the weekend never came but you knew it was coming because it was supposed to come. The third morning, he walked back thinking about his ex-wife and how she had left him because he was always tired and he had been tired for so long that he did not remember what it was like to not be tired.

By the hundredth morning, he walked back without thinking about anything at all, which was its own kind of tired.

This is how it went for three years. Every morning at five. Every evening at six-thirty. Five miles round trip. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, give or take a holiday that he would spend sitting on his couch watching the news and drinking a beer that cost two dollars and forty-nine cents.

Then, one morning, the missing piece appeared.

Frank was halfway back when he noticed it. The third set of rails, the one that ran closest to the creek bed, had a gap in it. Not a big gap—a man could step over it without thinking. A foot, maybe. Maybe fourteen inches. A piece of rail had been removed from the middle of it, and the ends had been filed smooth so that they looked like they had been cut by someone who knew what they were doing and wanted it to look like they had always been there.

Frank stopped. He looked at the gap. He looked down the track in both directions, as though he expected to see someone standing there with a wrench and a piece of rail and an explanation for what they were doing. But there was no one. The tracks were empty and the field was empty and the sky was empty and the world was empty.

He stepped over the gap and he continued walking.

The next morning, the gap was still there.

The next morning, the gap was still there.

The next morning, Frank brought a flashlight and he examined the gap closely. The cut was clean, almost professional. Whoever was doing this knew what they were doing. They were not just taking pieces of rail and throwing them in a field. They were removing them carefully, one at a time, one track at a time, and they were making sure that the ends looked clean so that no one would notice until it was too late.

Frank stood over the gap for a long time. He thought about calling the police. He thought about calling the railroad. He thought about writing a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Tribune. He thought about all of these things the way a man thinks about things that other people do when he is standing in a field at six in the morning looking at a hole in a train track that nobody else seems to have noticed.

He did not call anyone. He walked back.

The gap stayed. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. Frank walked past it every morning and he looked at it every morning and he wondered about the person who had made it and what they wanted and why nobody else seemed to care.

One morning, the gap was still there. Another morning, the gap was still there. Another morning, the gap was still there. And then, one morning, the gap was not there.

Frank stopped at the third set of rails and he looked down and the rail was there, solid and unbroken and continuous, and he put his boot on it and he pushed with his heel and it did not move and he knew it was real because he had been pushing on the absence of it for so long that he could tell the difference between the thing and the space where the thing used to be.

He walked the rest of the way to the mill. He stood at the gate for an hour. He walked back. He looked at the rail again. It was there. He kicked it. It was solid.

He did not smile. He did not cry. He did not feel anything that could be named. He simply turned around and he continued walking because this was what he did and this was what he had always done and this was what he would continue to do until the day he did not do it anymore.

The next morning, the rail was still there. The next morning, it was still there. The next morning, it was still there.

Frank walked past it every morning and he did not look at it much anymore. He had gotten used to the gap. He had gotten used to not looking at it. And now that it was gone, he did not look at it because looking at it would be like looking at something you have missed and missed and missed and then suddenly it is there and you do not know whether to be glad or sorry that it is there.

He continued walking. Every morning. Five miles. Three hours. A gap and then no gap and then a gap and then no gap and then a gap and then no gap, and every morning he walked past it the same way, without looking, without thinking, without feeling.

This is not a story about a man who found meaning. This is not a story about a man who found purpose. This is a story about a man who walked. He walked every morning. He walked because he had nothing else to do and because walking was something he could do and because the tracks were there and because they led somewhere even if that somewhere was just a steel mill that had been closed for fifteen years and a gate that nobody locked and a building full of furnaces that had been cold for a very long time.

One winter morning, it was snowing and the tracks were covered in snow and the gap—if there was a gap—was invisible beneath the white blanket that had fallen overnight and would not melt until March if the weather held and March was a long way away.

Frank walked past it. He did not know if the gap was there. He did not know if it was not there. He simply walked and he breathed and the cold air burned his lungs and he did not care because this was what he did and this was what he had always done and this was what he would continue to do until the day he did not do it anymore.

And when that day came, it would come the way all days come—in the morning, at five, when the coffee was still hot and the tracks were still there and the world was still turning and a man was still walking because this was what he did.

Author Note & Copyright: