12 Days of Christmas Challenge

I have decided to join The Iron Writer's "12 Days of Christmas Challenge!"  Every day for the next, well, now 10 days (I'm a little behind), we will be given special prompts, modeled after The Iron Writer's weekly challenges, but specially made just for a little bit of Christmas cheer.  For those of you unfamiliar with The Iron Writer, where have you been?  It is only the most amazing way for writer's to prove their chops, all the while engaging in the kind of smartmouthed banter that we artist types do best.  You don't have to be an Iron to take part in this challenge, though.  Simply meander over to http://theironwriter.com/twelve-days-of-christmas-quickies-challenge  and submit in the comments section your piece of flash fiction (200 words or less!) based on the following:

Element: A partridge or a pear tree
Emotion:  Infinite Possibility
Image:


I decided to link all of my stories together into one cohesive piece.  The first installment is below.  Enjoy, and I look forward to seeing you in the lists!

The Time Train

Ryan hunkered in the woodline next to the tracks, mentally inventorying the items in her rucksack.  The pack contained, amongst other things, five pairs of socks, four pairs of underwear, two canteens, three books of matches, “and a partridge in a pear tree,” Ryan sang softly.  It was frigid, and Ryan shivered even inside the layers in which she was cocooned.  Thick, heavy snowflakes collected in her lashes, making prisms out of the streetlamps that shone in the distance.  Still, if this worked, if the legends were true, everything – the cold, the months spent planning, even the life she left behind, would be worth it.  There were tales of a train, a train that traveled not just from state to state, but from world to world, in and out of time itself.  One every hundred years, on the solstice, it was said to travel through Decatur, flashing by the cornfields and rattling the decrepit old depot.  Ryan had dreamt about the train for as long as she could remember, would send her Barbies leaping, their matted hair flying, onto the train tracks that she’d lay across the kitchen floor.  A noise.  Was it the wind?  They said that it sounded like a tornado. They said that you didn’t try to board the train; they said you just jumped, that the wind would pull you in. They said. They said.  The wind blew harder, pulling at the strands of hair that had escaped Ryan’s woolen cap.