​Excerpt from a story I’m writing called On The Eastern Bank

Laura walked across the highway and then traversed under an onramp, which had abandoned tents under it. Beyond the tents was a stretch of grass, followed by trees, which opened up to more train tracks. A single span of tracks was surrounded by trees on both sides; though both sides had begun to take over the rails, one side of the trees was still visibly shallower than the other, and little effort had to be afforded to see what was on the other side. The trees on the left side were much thicker and were virtually opaque to the eyes. Instead of traversing through the giant mass of trees of brush, Laura opted to walk around, walking ways up the tracks before reaching an area where the forest waned ultimately to a grassy square of land. From here, there was another set of tracks upon which was a long line of train cars. The cars were oil tankers headed out of New Orleans but now sit here rotting. The smell of oil was almost unbearably strong, indicating that some of the tanks had their metal rotted through. Laura quickly moved through the gaps between the train cars, being presented with more train tracks with a ditch in the middle. The ditch was lined with concrete blocks on both sides, around 80 feet in length, and muddy, dirty water was in the middle. A few feet from her was a wooden plank bridge spanning the gap. It was constructed of old planks as a walkway, held up by cut-down tree trunks. Laura was hesitant but was also not too eager to interact with the black water, so she carefully inched her way across, listening for the sounds of any cracking or splintering. After a few seconds of dread, Laura made it across the ditch and traversed the other train tracks.