By Zary Fekete

“You can’t pray a lie – I found that out.” Emmanuel lifted his head after re-reading the same line for the fifth time. He finally gave up. He had been trying to read Huckleberry Finn to practice his English, but his mind couldn’t focus on it.

It should have been easy to concentrate. The scenery around him never changed. He had already ridden the 200-meter line of New Brunswick railroad track dozens of times that day, the same as every day on this job. He finally put down the book and let his mind wander back over the past few weeks.

He grew up in Haiti, and after turning eighteen he aged out of the orphanage and had to leave. He lived on the street for several months. His only possession was a plastic folder containing his identification card and his immigration application.

Last year, due to a filing mistake in the immigration office, Emmanuel had been approved to move from Haiti to Canada. He knew his Haitian paperwork wasn’t proper, but someone must have missed it. He boarded the plane in Port-au-Prince, and two days later his village was buried in a mudslide.

His flight landed in Toronto. The processing agent said he could stay in the city or he could be transferred to New Brunswick in eastern Canada.

“You’ll like it there,” the officer said, “The prices are low.”

“Where is it?” asked Emmanuel.

“In the east. North of Maine. America Maine. Many people speak French.” The officer told him that the only jobs available to refugees in Toronto were restaurant jobs…and even those were in high demand.

Emmanuel agreed and a day later he moved into a small apartment in Bayside, New Brunswick. Soon a driver from the packing plant arrived and took him to the fish transport station.

The driver told him about the job. He said any time cargo is shipped between two US ports it must travel on US-built transports, which is pricey in taxes. The driver said the only exception to the rule is if some part of the trek is on Canadian railways, which gives the freight company a huge tax break. In order to take advantage of this rule, the freight companies were working some international angles. Fish caught in Alaska were loaded onto international ships headed south to the Panama Canal. The ships crossed the canal and then traveled north to New Brunswick where the fish was loaded onto Canadian rail cars. The freight then rolled on exactly 200 meters of track: the shortest stretch of official railroad track in the world, just to take advantage of the tax break. The cargo was transferred onto trucks where it eventually crossed the border into Maine…destined for restaurants in the United States, mostly McDonald’s.

On the first day, the freight foreman pointed to a railroad car, the rear one, and handed Emmanuel a notebook and a pen. He told him to sit on a wooden platform attached to the last car and to record in the notebook the exact time that the cars departed down the 200-meter stretch of track and to note exactly when the cars came to a stop. That was the entirety of Emmanuel’s job.

At first the ease of the job made the time seem delightful. Back in Haiti, much of Emmanuel’s life was filled with solving countless daily problems. Everybody in Haiti was used to a certain kind of DIY lifestyle. If there was a fire in your house, you had to put it out. No firetruck was coming. If the pothole in the street grew too large, it was your job to fill it. There was no infrastructure for these things.

It didn’t take long for the initial excitement of his new life to wear off. The 200-meter track was like a fishbowl. Emmanuel could feel the repetitious rhythm of it in his sleep. He felt the images and smells of it when he closed his eyes at night: the flanking forest, the scent of oil mixed with fir fronds, the ugly jolt when the cars stopped. Each day bled into the next.

He watched the many containers of fish roll by. He and the fish were both confined to a world of schedule and predictable next steps. And they were both here in New Brunswick because of small clerical errors.

Emmanuel’s mind often drifted, especially in the lulls between arrivals and departures. The scent of the fir fronds, sharp and green, would mix with the oil from the rails, and he’d be back in Haiti. Not just remembering, but reliving: the sound of mudslide warnings, the taste of dust in the air after the earth had swallowed his village, the orphanage director’s voice, sharp as broken glass: “No room for dreamers here.” He’d slept with his plastic folder pressed against his chest, the only thing he owned, the only thing that mattered. Now, it was just him and the fish, both caught in a loop of paperwork and someone else’s mistakes.

He wondered about the fish. Did they know where they were going? Did they care? Their scales dulled over the days in transit, their eyes clouded. He imagined them whispering to him, “Why do you watch us drown in air?” He didn’t have an answer. He just watched, and wrote down the times, and watched some more. The routine was a kind of drowning, too.

Sometimes, when the train stopped, he’d stare at the forest and think about the mudslide. The randomness of it. The clerk’s mistake was a god who didn’t blink. What divine error spared him and swallowed a mountainside? He felt a quiet rage, not at anyone in particular, but at the way things just happened, the way lives were decided by accidents and forms.

Then, one afternoon, something changed. The train shuddered to a stop, and as Emmanuel glanced down at the gravel, he saw a fish that had slipped from a tub. It lay there, gasping, its gills pulsing like a metronome. Without thinking, he jumped down, cupped the fish in his hands. Its body was cold and slick, the water from the transport tank still clinging to its scales. He felt the chill seep into his skin, a sensation he hadn’t felt since Haiti’s rains.

He climbed back up to drop the fish back in to the tank. But then he stopped. He held the wriggling fish for a moment longer. The world felt less like a machine and more like something alive. The train started again, and Emmanuel hopped off, the fish still in his hands. He stumbled over to his lunch pail. Awkwardly holding the fish beneath his arm, he took out the sandwich and the thermos and put the scaly creature into the plastic container. It flopped around a moment and then lay still, its gills throbbing gently. Emmanuel walked over to a tap that stood alongside the tracks and slowly filled the pail. And as the water filled, he sensed, faint as a fingerprint, the lingering the scent of river.

He jumped onto the last car of the train as it slowly rumbled past and looked out at the track ahead. He set the pail down at his side, and the fish swam in circles, trapped but alive. Emmanuel took a deep breath and watched the forest blur past. For the first time in weeks, he felt something unfamiliar…a warmth, small but real, spreading in his chest. He didn’t know what it meant, but he decided to call it hope.

###

Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky:zaryfekete.bsky.social