Rumblestorm

I stand staring through the blinds at a train passing by, to count the cars and see what type they are. First, three engine cars with the tiny engineer in the lead. This will be a heavy load, and it is: all gravel, or coal. Car after car of it, each piled in the same way, to the same fullness, weighting down the engineer heading north. No, west. Why was north my first instinct? But there is a romanticism to the West, toward mystery and the unknown. I remember counting 64, then I keep counting in my head as I my periphery vision takes in the violence of the wind on the branches of trees and bushes in the side yard. A flash of lighting and I count on my fingers the seconds between the sight and the sound. Six. Suddenly I am at 91 in my train-car count. Is that possible? I think not, but I cannot stop. The last car comes in at 104, but I estimate 84 in reality, wondering how my mind skipped ahead a possible twenty digits.

The thoughts in my head are in a strange voice; it must be because I read poetry and then fell asleep, waking up half an hour later to a sound like my mother's old electrolux vaccuum dragging down the hall, banging into baseboards. I return to lucidity, but the sound persists.
Out on the stoop, it is the clouds, banging into each other as they steadily slide eastward, toward the coal-train I do not yet know is on its way to pass my house for me to count it and wonder at.