It’s a silly thing to be human…or at least it must be. Reb listened to the clacking of the track below and watched the smoke rising above. She seemed to be something else now, inhabiting an unfamiliar body—precisely what she wanted to feel when she left her life in Chicago behind. For the first time in a long while, her soul felt the sensation of slipperiness.

She had spent so many days in transit that it no longer seemed as though she’d ever had a home, as if she’d always been an itinerant denizen of the railways. She began her journey by taking the Illinois Central line down to New Orleans. From there, she’d switched to the Southern Pacific line, trading the swampy August humidity of Louisiana for the penetrating heat of Arizona. She’d been perspiring perpetually for longer than she could recall.

Night and day blended together in a hypnogogic fog. She slid in and out of a light sleep that never truly began or ended but was continually interrupted by a jolt of uneven track or a blast from the locomotive’s steam whistle.

Reb found prolonged train travel deleterious, though this was only her second multi-day journey by rail. Her first trip had been thirteen years before, when she traveled to Virginia for the inaugural Decoration Day. She thought she might find closure at Arlington National Cemetery and an end to the despair over her betrothed, who had died a fortnight before the conclusion of the War Between the States.

Instead, she contracted an infection of the lungs that kept her bedridden for more than a month in a hospital near Robert E. Lee’s erstwhile plantation. She still labored to breathe when climbing stairs.

Now she felt as if she were coming down with a cold…at the height of summer, no less. She would be quite a sight for her sister to see when she arrived in Benson, Arizona. Milly would likely inquire a dozen times about her health during the twenty-five-mile stagecoach ride from the station to Milly’s home in Tombstone. Though that’s what older sisters do—worry about their unwed, half-dead-looking younger siblings. It would be a struggle to convince Milly that her wan appearance was merely the result of too much travel and too little sleep. The prospect was exhausting.

Reb felt no regret for the life she was leaving. She had been a teacher of unruly tenement children whose parents did not value education, considering school just a place to send offspring too young for work to get them out of the home for a few hours each day. Perhaps to some extent they were right. In a city so full of opulence and affluence, most of the students she taught would have few opportunities when they were older beyond working in the stockyards.

If she could secure a position as a schoolmarm in a quiet mining town, maybe she could find peace. The prospect of happiness was too much to wish for, but her heart harbored hope that contentment could be found in a sleepy settlement on the edge of nowhere that lacked even a railroad station.

Reb began to cough as the train chugged up a steep gradient. The smoke expelled from the steam engine’s stack darkled from a light gray to a sooty charcoal color.