Ticket, please. It’s a 6.

Shifting my weight in the ancient papasan chair, plump with bright tropical flower patterned cushions, I lay partially on my side, tanned legs comfortably curled, hard cover book open carefully so as not to bend its binding.

I’d been lounging on the back patio out of the sun’s reach, catching up on reading and relaxing, enjoying the smells of the ocean and the muffled pounding of the surf when a jolt of vertigo abruptly grabbed me, sending my stomach into a summersaulty flip-flop; I immediately sat upright, each hand simultaneously reaching down either side of my thighs to find a firm anchor in the chair’s cushions.

All aboard!…All aboard!!…Aw-ll a-board!!

What the…it was a train conductor’s voice all red velvet sweetness, the softly shouted syllables hanging in the air like crisp clean, cotton sheets pinned to a clothesline, billowing in the breeze of a mid-summer morning.

After the vertigo eased, I walked to the edge of the patio to search the area of the backyard where I’d heard or thought I’d heard a man’s voice; seeing nothing out of the ordinary, nothing hiding behind the yellow hibiscus or pink butterfly bushes, nothing lurking around the live oak, I concluded it was my imagination, convincing myself I must have been experiencing that weird state before you fall asleep – when you have one foot in sleep-land and the other just beginning to step off the curb to join it.

Impossible…the unmistakable sound of a train whistle faint in the distance, I lost equilibrium again; that’s when I saw him in the far left corner of the backyard – a train conductor dressed in a dark colored 3 piece suit, brass buttoned coat, vest, trousers perfectly pressed and creased, the bill of his pillbox cap embroidered in gleaming, gold thread, he held a pocket watch in his left hand; behind him, where a wooden fence ought to be, was a black wrought iron gate beyond which was an old style wooden train platform, a few empty wooden benches and an idling train…the conductor gently smiled at me, pointed to his gold pocket watch, then looked towards the waiting train.