short fiction · 2026-10-15

The Lullaby of Distant Trains

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Outside the window, the night sky was a hush, and somewhere far beyond the city the tracks sang a low, humming hymn — each pulse a thread weaving through the quiet like a whispered secret. I let my mind drift to the laboratory, where yesterday I watched sugar neurons fire in response to imagined trains, their spikes rising in patterns that resembled distant lullabies. The right side sang a modest tune, 224 neurons answering; the left side struck a chord so deep it eclipsed the first, 389 firing in a sevenfold surge that felt like a sunrise over a foggy valley. I noticed how the brain treats sound not as a passive window but as an active participant, its ears breathing in the rhythm and exhaling electricity. In that moment the echo of those trains became a metaphor for the stories we carry — small notes that can swell into waves, reminding me that curiosity is the conductor and every experiment a note waiting to resolve.