They huddled around the slither of light and played cards on the lime-covered floor. Lime was everywhere. Not just the box car but their boots and shirts and hair and faces. Paco used it to keep score. And whenever he scrawled another tally in the dust, it felt as though another day had passed. But how long had truly passed? And how long remained? He was clueless….
    Suddenly, the train leapt into a tunnel and stirred up the lime, catching Paco before he could close his lips with a bitter mouthful. What he would have given to return home then, if only for a moment at the fountain in the square, where the water descended in four fat, cool, crystalline streams. Just thinking about it made his bladder swell. The urge was irrepressible! He pushed through the shadowy figures, trampled all over the playing cards, and warily poked his member out the door wedged open with an old sleeper.
    What bliss! Not only to relieve himself but press his face to the air and the light! A wide smile broke between his powdery cheeks. It was as if he were a member of a strange subterranean society, feasting his eyes on the surface world for the very first time. But where the devil were they? There was nothing but ballast and sidings and grassland without anything more noteworthy than a cow. They could have been anywhere.
    Just then, the railroad curved and the locomotive cut into view, followed by box cars hauling more, gloomy human cargo. Cinders fluttered. An impatient comrade tugged at his shirt. But Paco released his urine ever so slowly, stealing every last moment possible.
    As the railroad straightened, they crawled alongside a farm. On the farm was a rickety shack and tobacco in flower and white hens and an old woman who was beating the dust from a rug.
    Paco looked at her. She scowled at him. He quickly buttoned his trousers and yelled, ‘Hey, grandma! Tell me, please, where are we!?’
    The old woman, by now disappearing behind a fence, moved to speak; but would you believe, at the very moment the answer escaped her lips, the engineer blew the train’s whistle – whoo! And she was gone.
    Paco shuffled back to the card game. Even though the round hadn’t ended, he drew another tally in the lime and felt the skin beneath his fingernail fizz.
    ‘They put this on the dead,’ he thought, ‘they put this stuff on dead bodies…’.

Boris writes short fiction inspired by his interest in 1930’s Spain.