The empty car on the last train west seemed as empty as a car could be. After all, who wants to ride a train with no fellow passengers in it with which to pass the time? So whenever the train pulled into a station, all the new passengers would glance into the empty car and clamber aboard the cars that other passengers had chosen before them. After all, who wants to be last? Who dares to enter an empty car and be the first to choose to ride there? Who indeed?

Miss Millicent Smith, that’s who, the one passenger who dared to step aboard, choosing to be last, or first, if you look at it in a different way.

And Miss Millicent Smith did look at it in a different way. She looked at everything in a different way. She had done so all her life and her life was long and as seemingly empty as the car she had chosen to take her on her last journey into the west.

She had not fallen in love, so she had not married. Neither falling in love nor marrying had meant she had no children. She had no home but the homes of others for when stepping out into the world, she had chosen the life of a nursery maid, or rather it had chosen her as she had no schooling and no money from wealthy relatives to leaven her way. Neither had she looks or wit or any particular skill that would set her apart from the herd.

But what she did have was an imagination and it was her imagination that set her free and made her choose the last car, the empty car, for in her imagination, it was neither last nor empty. It was filled with the most amazing people, all sharing her journey, all eager to tell their stories, to have Miss Millicent Smith hear their adventures and set their tales down on paper for others to read, for having no existence beyond Miss Smith’s verdant imagination, to them she was the most important person in the world and the car at the end of the train which others saw as being the last was, to them, the first since that car held Miss Millicent Smith, the writer.

© 2020 Storm