Signs
by Carol Novack
It was not immediately clear what caused the derailment. In fact, it remains a mystery to everyone in the world but one; nobody really believes the official story. There were witnesses who swore they'd seen a weeping Virgin Mary appear on the tracks an instant before the incident, ones who spoke of the wrath of the lord. Apparently, they were testing new bicycles when the train capsized. Afterwards, they hung around singing hymns and bearing signs about lust and blasphemy.
Then there were others who swore they'd seen Allah squatting on the tracks. They all came too, praying boisterously and bearing Jihad signs. The Taoists and Buddhists arrived silently and sat on the tracks with legs folded like formal dinner napkins.
Naturally, the reporters set up camp at the site and did their best to interview the alleged witnesses before five o'clock each day, when it was time for Black Sea beer and blinis. The police were too busy sleeping off cheap vodka to bother. But the cameramen managed to obtain dramatic video close-ups of dying passengers and a ferocious fight that erupted amongst thirteen Christians and Muslims; three of the cameramen were struck down by signs in the mayhem. The news people stood around looking for the Big Scoop; for days they did. They even looked in the sky and twice mistook the Dipper for the Scoop. Eventually, the official story came to be storks on the tracks: an important wire-making mogul from Moscow claimed that he'd seen a pair of them perched on the rails. A pushy reporter from St. Petersburg received credit for the solution.
Meanwhile, in far off Nigeria, it was Oma who knew. She knew well about the children floating face down on the black rivers of Nigeria. She knew that the children had been floating ever since the Kookoa god rained some pretty weird shit water into those rivers. The god of the black rivers had taken the village children's breaths away, as Grandmother Oma Oma had predicted. Now Oma was alone in the village bereft of its children. Alone, without eyes, she followed the flow of the black rivers carrying her three daughters. She saw the waters dance over the tracks; saw the dead children ride the tracks and the face of the terrified train driver. But no one would ever know. And no one would've believed the ravings of an old black woman who had lost her sight from grief.
Copyright © 2006 Carol Novack
New Yorker Carol Novack is a lapsed criminal defense and constitutional lawyer. Most relevant, she's a persistently re-emerging writer. A long time ago, in another century, a book of her poems, "Living Alone Without a Dictionary," was published in Australia, where Carol received a creative writer's grant equivalent to an NEA. Her poetry and prose have appeared and are forthcoming in many publications, including The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, Anemone Sidecar, Big Bridge, Diagram, Elimae, 5_Trope, Journal of Modern Post, LIT, Milk, Mindfire Renewed, Muse Apprentice Guild, Newtopia, Opium, Pindeldyboz, Ravenna Hotel, Retort, SmokeLong Quarterly, Unlikely Stories, Wild Strawberries, Word Riot & Yankee Pot Roast. She's the publisher & editor of Mad Hatters' Review, and has been featured at many readings in the New York City area. Carol's prose poem "Destination" was selected as a "best" of webdelsol fiction. She writes a blog. An interview of Carol as publisher/editor may be found on WebDelSol.