Lee Ann Pingel
900 Miles
For Jack Pingel, 1937−2013
Miles away, a train whistle uncoils and stretches in the dark. Like any beast, a train marks its territory, howling that you have left the city, left the California coast. Such a cry caught my father short in a restaurant parking lot, his eyes snapping to mine, startled as if I’d slapped him. I love that sound, he said, interrupting himself, and I watched him climb aboard and ride that train somewhere far away, maybe to a towheaded Nebraska summer boyhood, pelting through the cornstalks to lay a paper-route penny on the rails, scrambling back just enough to lose himself in the furnace of roar and wind. Or maybe to a winter plains’ evening, the thrum in the walls mingling with the one in his chest, the wail tendering to the night the hidden content of his heart. I’ll never know. Three breaths measured his silence before he roused and continued, speaking of nothing I remember now.
Lee Ann Pingel was once told she was trying to be dog-walker in a world that requires jockeys, a fact reflected in her degrees in creative writing, political science, and religion. Most of her work revolves around themes of faith, doubt, and navigating a life marked but not defined by its wounds. She lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is a freelance editor. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Mother Mary Comes to Me from Madville Publishing, as well as in Rascal, Rat’s Ass Review, Hobo Camp Review, The Fib Review, Contemporary Haibun Online, and other journals.
