A train had gone right through our basement.
This was very odd.
For weeks we'd been hearing its aggressive call, its dissonant, distinctive horn sometimes in the distance, sometimes loud, as if it were right across the street. With the lake on the north side and the forest bisected by the parkway on the south, either was quite impossible. But we all heard it, including the neighbors.
"Did you hear that?" one of us would say, somewhat redundantly.
"Television," someone usually answered, but eventually it became clear that the TV could not possibly be to blame.
"The Polar Express," joked someone. It seemed just as likely.
But no matter. Now we had direct evidence that somehow, it had warned us in the only manner it was programmed how, and apparently now we were being punished for not heeding; our basement was ravaged, as if by a tsumani--a perfectly straight, ten-foot-wide tsunami.
It was all most unusual.
It became evident that we would have to move. "The foundation of the house has been compromised," explained Dad, meaning either the actual structure of the house or our belief that we had collectively, formerly held that we were safe from trains. "We'll have to move." Strangely, the neighbors had not endured the same wreckage. They had heard the horn, but their houses remained intact, as were the yards at the train's entrance and exit. It was as if the train simply appeared at one wall, wrought havoc in its determined path, and crashed through the opposite wall.
Then where did it go?
"I'm just so thankful no one was sleeping down there last night," said Mom tearfully. This was because the nights, though June, had been getting increasingly colder, and the train night had even dropped below freezing. Someone suggested that that was what allowed us to hear the train at all, because sound travels faster through stagnant air. It was true that we only ever heard it at night, and the days were seasonably warm.
Unfortunately, we could not move immediately because our insurance company refused to pay for the damage, citing our failure to have purchased train insurance prior to the incident. When the town hall heard, someone came to assess the situation, got mad at us for allowing property values to fall, and tried valiantly to find some way to blame us or the house. When that failed, it seemed they would be forced to deal with the fact that a train inexplicably rent our house in two, but even then they merely sniffed and said our shed was build too close to the property line and would have to be removed or "taken in" seven inches, and that it was impossible for a train to go through a house that was not built on tracks, so why in heaven's name did we live in a house built on train tracks?
