"Are you ready?"
Cecilia looked up at Matthias and the delighted light that was dancing in his eyes. He was a school boy showing off his favorite toy, except in this case it was a steam train from the 1800s. Pardon me, a time traveling steam train from the 1800s.
"I think so" she replied cautiously.
"Then all aboard!" Matthias lifted Cecilia with ease onto the first step of the train car. She gathered her bustled skirts close to herself as she carefully navigated up the remaining three steps. She slid back the polished oak door and gasped as she stepped in the train's lounge car. It was a world of gleaming brass and lush velvets. Silk damask wall paper glinted in the car's gas lighting. A table with two small chairs sat to one side while across the room a plush fainting couch beckoned for a nice lie-down.
Cecilia walked through the lounge car, down the narrow hallway of the sleeping cars to come to the doorway of the train's engine. There Matthias stood, his coat carefully hung on a peg beside, his sleeves rolled up and carefully tucked away, as he set about the business of preparing the train for the trip through time.
Sensing her behind him, Matthias called over his shoulder, "We use the train to make the hump. Since New York city has the longest-running mass transit in the country it means we can arrive anywhere within the last two hundred years without making a fuss."
"What if you want to go back further than that?" Cecilia asked curiously.
"Someone is going to have to figure out how to retrofit a carriage with enough steel and titanium to make it safe. Since no one has figured that out yet, we are stuck in the age of train travel. Trust me, there is more than enough there to keep you busy."
Cecilia noticed a tiny plaque on the train door, "What's this mean? From small acorns great oaks grow."
"It's the Rockefeller family motto. People always thought it was a reference to his poor beginnings and it was. But it's also a theory of time travel, one inciting incident grows the branches of time, forming the great oak of history. It's why there are acorns and oak leaves all through Grand Central station. He built the entire station as a cover for his time traveling experiments."
©2020 by Leila Ghaznavi. All rights reserved.