Free The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride by Hortense Calisher

theirs. And that this was the inexhaustible doubleness of the world.
    When I got to the viaduct, I found out why they had urged me here. One of the niches was occupied, by I-don’t-know-who, rolled up in my raincoat. I sat down next to him, pushed my pouch against the wall for a pillow, and considered him, snug in my coat there, if it rained.
    Would he lend his half, in that case?
    Does the future of the world depend upon it?
    And would I steal it back for my own, when I woke?
    Does the future of the world depend upon it?
    Along toward dawn, he roused himself, stumbled toward the public convenience, didn’t get that far, but in a gentlemanly, sleepwalking way, managed to put a fair distance between us. Behind him, the night went up one lucent step. Head bent, he looked from the rear as if he were praying. I appreciated his courtesy.
    So, when he came back, I said in a cheery voice, “I’ll lend you back the half you stole, eh?” Bleary-eyed, he nodded, without another look at me, and so we lay down to sleep, back to back, in mutual trust, or a draw. He and I were harmless.
    I lay for a while on my elbow. Before me, the ordinary phoenix-fire of day was rising. We are born, we live and we die; crouch and adore. I watched the waterbugs streak like lizards from the Chinese restaurant, the men stride like catamounts, from plain doors. In the inexhaustible doubleness of the world, are there signals everywhere, wild as grass, that unite us? Or must we unite them?
    What is imagination? I used to think it was to struggle against the facts like a fly trying to get out of the cosmos.
    Come, you narks, cops, feds, dicks, railway police, members of the force everywhere! Run with us! If the world is round, who’s running after who?
    In the cold of morning, I wrapped a scarf about my ears, but loosely, no deception, and lay down to rest with plenty of leeway until well after sunup, when the first rounds are once again made. Children can learn to be bald. And so to bed. What is imagination? And so to dream the answer, which I knew of course, but could never say. And so—I was born.

The Last Trolley Ride

I
    T HERE WERE ONCE, SAID my grandfathers Jim— this was years ago—two sisters named Emily and Lottie Pardee, nice girls with pleasant enough small faces and ankles too, but they lived at the end of the town, and nobody could keep them in mind. Ever so often, people would suddenly remember this fact, that nobody could keep the Pardee girls in mind, and this would last for a while, but then that would pass out of mind too. Their parents had been the same way; they would be at church and at church suppers like anybody else, and they were invited to weddings too, like everybody else—and afterwards, when people were going over the affair in their minds, they could recall very well that the Pardees had been there. But scarcely anybody ever recalled afterward that they ever got to any of the really important places where things were transacted, like last minute phone calls to come to supper, or small meetings in the vestry or grange, which hadn’t been arranged for, or even picnics and pajama-parties, when they were young. And when the parents died, leaving the girls with the neat little house out of town to keep, and, it was said, a tidy little sum to do it with, alas, it was soon clear that they had been left this other inheritance too. For one might have thought that lots of young sparks would be drawn to that cozy fireside—even two at a time, since there were two Pardees—and that with the automobile coming in as strong as it was, there would be a double wedding out there in jigtime. But it just didn’t seem as if this would ever happen. There are some people born to live at the end of a town.
    So what the sisters did, for they had a sort of quiet spunkiness between them, was to have a bay window cut into the front of the house, and they set up to boiling fritters in it and selling them to eat. The fritters were wonderful;