HONORABLE MENTION, Winter 2025
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

BY KYLE PLACET

The last time I saw my sister was at a family dinner where she was showing off her new boyfriend. I remembered thinking how this was the first guy she had brought around who actually seemed to fit her. She seemed happy.

She went missing in the spring. The first real rain to break the drought had come that winter, which led to a wave of wildflowers bursting from the ground, painting the hills in pastels. She vanished with the changing season and the flowers continued to bloom like nothing had happened.

I had a dream that she wandered into the hills to enjoy their beauty and lost all sense of time and of self and forgot about her home and her life and couldn’t come back. I watched her go from the foot of the hills, trying to call her back. But she ignored me and kept going until she was out of sight.

It hit everybody hard. The boyfriend especially. The poor guy was the number one suspect in her disappearance too. How can you properly mourn someone when you’re being blamed for what happened to them? My mother never really stopped thinking he had something to do with it.

She was declared legally dead a little over a year later. It was hard not to imagine that one day she would just wander on home and everything would be all right again, simple as that. The day I realized that wasn’t going to happen was the day it all finally hit me.

I felt lost. Life going forward didn’t seem to make sense. I would never even get to know why.

I became friends with the boyfriend, out of mutual grief. We helped each other through our loss. Told each other memories of her and made it seem like she wasn’t fully gone. We started dating for a bit but that didn’t last. We could just never feel comfortable together.

He showed me a place that was special to her. A short hike through the woods and you found yourself at an abandoned train station. All that was there was a wooden platform, a small boarded-up ticket office, and a bench. You could hardly see the tracks for all the overgrown foliage. She had found it and had loved the natural beauty and the melancholic serenity of the station. It was where she went when she was stressed and wanted to get away from the world. Now it was where he went to try to feel close to her.

He disappeared in the fall. We had been rapidly growing apart for some time and at first I thought he had simply left town to start somewhere new, but I learned from a friend of a friend that no one knew where he’d gone. I felt numb at the news. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t feel worse. It just seemed inevitable.

Winter stripped the station of some of its magic, with the tree branches reduced to barren, grasping twigs. It lost its historic serenity, its connection to the past. It was replaced by the creeping unease of a place that should have stayed lost.

I didn’t know if I had ever liked the place as much as he did, even when it was beautiful. I felt like I was visiting her grave. In a way that was sort of how I started to see it. That’s why I had come that day. To talk to her. To say goodbye. My life had become a mess and I needed to move on or die.

I had only meant to stay an hour. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I reminisced about my lost sibling and imagined one-sided conversations that we never got to have. Tears came down my cheeks at random intervals as I talked, like someone turning a faucet on and off. Every time I felt like I should leave, I found myself unable to turn away. Because I felt certain that, when I left, I would leave her behind. And then another thought would occur. Another memory. Another thing to say.

Soon the sun fell behind the hills and the distant mountains, and the only remaining light was from the hazy dull dregs of the dying day and the rising moon. I knew I had to go then, and never come back. I finished the aching sobs that had started just after sunset, when I realized my time there was ending. I said one last goodbye, and got up to leave.

It was then that I felt the presence of something behind me. I turned and stared down the unkempt rail tracks, down the dark corridor of shadowy, barren trees. A train was coming, breaking through branches and fallen deadwood. As it approached, what little color was left in the day seemed to fade until my eyes were almost seeing in black and white. As the train drew closer I realized that I had gone deaf. I could no longer hear the breaking branches, the chugging engine, the wind in the trees, anything. The silence was strangely deafening. But still, I stayed.

It wasn’t fear that kept me there, kept me watching, as the monochrome train crawled into the station. It was the certainty that my sister had found this train the night she disappeared—and afterward, her boyfriend probably had found it as well.

The train came to a silent stop, the passenger cars lined up with the platform. After a few seconds pause the doors soundlessly slid open.

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