The Last Lantern

A watchmaker leaves a light in the window for the last train.

On the last evening of October, Mara polished the watch in her window and lit the little blue lantern beside it. The station had closed in spring, yet every evening at six she heard the rails sing. A freight train, her brother said. The sound a cold piece of iron makes, said the stationmaster. Mara had repaired enough clocks to know that a sound could be ordinary and still mean something.

That evening, a girl stopped outside with a brass key on a ribbon. “Do you know what this opens?” she asked. Mara tried it in a drawer, a biscuit tin and the oldest clock in the shop. The key fitted nothing. But when the girl set it beside the lantern, the watch in the window began to tick. Mara had never wound it. She had been waiting for its owner for thirty years.

“My grandmother said the light would be here,” the girl said. She showed Mara a photograph of a woman on the station platform. Mara recognised the watch on her wrist, and the red scarf she had once lent her for a cold journey. On the back, in a handwriting she had nearly forgotten, someone had written: I made it home.

Mara lifted the watch out of its stand. She placed it in the girl’s palm and closed her fingers around it. Outside, the rails grew quiet. They drank tea until the lantern went out.