by Aaron Fernando
Inspired by the forgotten Rockaway Beach Branch of the LIRR, opened in 1880 and closed in 1962.
They abandoned the tracks and assumed no one would follow. They raised wire fences and assumed the ground beneath would rejoice at the reprieve. They left trestles dangling by threads and assumed the children wouldn’t tug on their parents’ sleeves as they passed beneath, asking, “What’s this for?”
They abandoned the tracks because they didn’t know what to do with the remains. Cremation was too costly, and a funeral was out of the question, so they left it to the leaves, the empty plastic bottles, the rusted towers—they all came to rest atop the resting. It was the burial of a skeleton that no one wanted to identify, an effort to blow on the sand and erase eight decades’ worth of footprints.
They abandoned the tracks and never looked back, fearing their own salification.
I looked anyway.
