Creative Writing: Homeless Home

Winter was in its fullness, and a railroad yard on the East Coast of the United States was a hideous place to be in the middle of a bitter, frozen, and unforgiving night. Aside from indigent people and bleakness, the yard was the dead-end for trains, for dreams, and the men who carried their hopes there. Railroad yards had always been a magnet for the jobless and stray homeless. Perhaps the cold and ugliness of the place made a perfect dumping ground for people whom society overlooked. The ground would rumble with incoming locals and outgoing expresses. Laws of survival made it a necessity for homeless transits to learn how to sleep through train whistles and screeching wheels of iron boxcars. The railroad yard was the ugly side of America,

There was old Jack, the one who closely resembled St. Nick, with his white beard and reddened cheeks. He was the talkative one, using his mouth as a tool for survival and always eager to share his illusive fortunes, easy money and unheard-of prosperity. Travis, a thin man who kept to himself, had come from the Midwest. He held a friendly countenance, yet made no close friends and had perfected the craft of not acquiring any enemies. His family members were back home living with in-laws as they waited for the day he would call them to a new life. They yearned to escape the monotonous routine all sharecroppers are doomed to have. The same cycle he grew up in and watched as it destroyed his parents. Dozens of Jakes, Joes, and Johns vanished as quickly as they appeared. They all believed they had a unique hardship tale. Vacant space around the fire barrel became unlikely as night progressed. Most refused to remember the goals they had set for themselves in their youth. At one time, success, wealth, and happiness were sure to be found. Now their goal was to find something burnable. They tried not to think of the

When the wheels stopped moving, a momentary alarm arose among the train's vagabond riders, fearing they arrived at another dimension where vibration and noise were not allowed. They jumped from the boxcar and entered the terminal. Faraway places were being mechanically auctioned via a loudspeaker; their names crashed into one another. Echoes flew through the station's corridors without hindrance. Port Authority Police found it easy to separate paying travelers from transients in a crowd. The former appeared to have come from somewhere and looked to be going somewhere else, and the latter steamed with aimlessness. Uniformed officers became escorts, displaying their disdain toward vagrants by corralling and contemptuously offering them an invitation to