The Train Inhabitants Series is a weekly series of twenty-five 1,000-words-or-less pieces based on the interesting people I see riding the train during my daily commute. Each drabble will center around the imagined life of one person, how they relate to the train, and the how they relate to the other people who ride the train with them. This series is designed to enable me to explore characters: their strengths, their flaws, their beauty and ugliness, along with the interconnectedness of the people we encounter throughout the day. At the end of the series, I plan to put together a small publication along with the In-between Alphabet Series, which I’m looking forward to.

Anyways leads in front or else it runs behind. It’s derisive, dead-pan, dominating, and dismissive and when you’ve practically had it figured out, it changes course or doubles back. It’s a reminder of a foregone choice. Or a choice of where to go.

"Anyways," she says and he braces himself, because he knows that the conversation can go any way. It’s most likely a way he refuses to contemplate, down the rabbit hole, falling and falling and ending up somewhere that’s a mirror image of everything he understands. "Anyways," and then she’s off, flitting and tripping and switching, flight or fight reflexes tensing his muscles, his mind scrambling to extract a kernel of sense of the tumbling words striking him in pinprick raindrops. An idea forms hazy in his cupped hands, though drips drops slip through his fingers still. He lifts it, carefully, tenderly, to sip, but before his lips can touch, she splashes it away with a throwaway, "Anyways," and shifts topic once again.

The In-between Alphabet Series will be a weekly series of twenty-six 1,000-words-or-less pieces based on the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Each drabble will explore one word, an in-between word. These are words that are generally found in-between sentences, the essential but largely forgotten words that have little meaning outside of the context of the sentence. This series is designed to give me a playground to develop my command of fresh literary language without constraints. At the end, I would like to put together a small publication, so stay tuned for that.