STEVEN J. YORK THE UNMARKED CROSSING Mars glows brightly just over the horizon, casting ghostly reflections on the waves. I look up at the sky, and my mind wanders. I hear the echoing cry of a slow freight train, winding its way along the track behind our beach house, back beyond the dunes. Then, the familiar itching in the back of my skull, the thoughts, unbidden, come into my head. I am having a vision. My mind's eye blinks away the sleep, and I see the grade crossing behind the house, marked with only a small wooden sign, easily missed in the darkness. The horn sounds again. It is a lonesome, mournful sound, like a prehistoric beast, the last of its kind, calling a mate that will never come. In my mind's eyes, I can see the locomotive, rocking down the track, clattering its way over the old steel bridge a few miles north, pulling its load of empty log cars from the mill up the coast. I think of the crossing, and the car that rolls up to the crossing, tires crackling and popping on the gravel, stopping squarely across the track. The woman driving is lost. She takes a map from a glove compartment and turns on the dome light. I look across the dunes, and can see the light in the upper floor bedroom of my beach house. Behind it is the railroad, and just beyond, the highway. I think about the train, and try to estimate how far it is from the crossing. She missed the turnoff for the freeway, thirty miles back. The intersection is poorly marked, and the moon is only now rising. People get lost there all the time. She studies the map intently. What was the name of the little town she just passed through? She can't remember. I begin walking up the beach, looking for the path between the beach front houses that will lead me to the street. I stumble in the darkness, and the dry grass that grows in the dunes stabs through the thin cloth of my slacks. I find the trail again, and quicken my pace. The woman spots the right town on the map, but decides that she can't possibly have gone that far wrong. She scans the highway, twenty miles south of where she actually is, looking for landmarks she will never find. She hears the train, but thinks of it only as a geographical reference. The track is nowhere near the road she is looking at, but she is looking at the wrong road. I come down the dunes between the houses across from my beach house. There is a streetlight, and I can see well enough to run now. Ahead of me is a small hill, and on the other side, the grade crossing. I am running, but I am out of shape. I haven't run more than twenty steps in years, and the little hill looms large before me. The locomotive cries out in warning. I can hear the bell ringing now. The woman is confused by the noise. She looks around, but the dome light prevents her from seeing much in the darkness. She looks back at the paper just as the train rounds the bend, its headlight lighting up the highway behind the car. If she would only look up, she would see it coming, but she is looking at the map. My legs pump weakly as I top the hill, lungs burning, eyes closed, I stumble and nearly fall, but I know the crossing is just ahead. The locomotive sounds its horn, so close and loud now that it is painful. I grab my left ear and run on. The woman looks up, sees the locomotive bearing down on her. She tries to start the car, but she has left the lights on. Her battery is weak, and the starter only clicks, like the click of the locomotive's wheels as it bears down on her. I run down the hill as fast as I can. I stumble and nearly fall. I feel the sound of the approaching train as much as I hear it. I open my eyes and the crossing is just ahead. There is no car. Only a dog. It is a small collie of some kind. It sniffs at something between the rails, oblivious to the train about to run it over, even as the behemoth sounds its final warning. Stupid creature. It must be deaf as a stump. I put my last reserves into a final burst of speed. I trip on the gravel ballast next to the track, and turn it into a dive. I catch the dog around the middle, my shoulder striking the far rail painfully as I roll. I think the dog yelps as I hit it, but I cannot hear. We roll down the bank, and splash into a shallow ditch. The train rumbles past, without having even slowed. I kneel in the mud, my injured shoulder hunched like Quasimodo as I listen to the train's wheels ringing across the joints in the rail like huge bells. The dog licks my face. I am elated. Then I hear the crash, the scream of crumpled metal, as the train strikes the car stalled at the next crossing.