prompt: fast, title: off the rails in misc. flash fiction

One of the more interesting holiday traditions to come forth in recent years is “The Polar Express Christmas Train Ride”, where tourist rail services redress one of their leaf-peeping trains with holiday ornamentations to vaguely re-enact parts of the charming “Polar Express” children’s book and horrifyingly-disturbing dead-eyed CGI film “Polar Express”. There’s cocoa and there’s holiday snacks, often they read the book to the kids, there is a meeting with a man in a Santa suit at the end. Other than forcing people to remember how uncanny and terrifying the film was, it is mostly harmless and highly-profitable. There’s a Polar Express out of Utica’s Union Station, just next door to us. Probably something down in the Cooperstown tourist area as well for all I know. It’s fast becoming that every town with a tourist rail has a Polar Express money-machine as well.

But that has led me to thinking, what other Tom Hanks vehicles could we refit into this profitable seasonal business-model? If one worked, the least likely to work no less, the computer-generated abomination against the Lord’s Own Design, the weeping gaping glimpse at the madness beyond time itself, if it worked for that film, it would work again. There’s all kinds of Hanks to mine for!

Why just get yourself some old Windows Ninety-Five computers, throw them in your train, serve lattes and biscotti and bam the You’ve Got Mail Express, for us lonely-hearts around Valentine’s.
That’d be a thousand times more appealing than the colon-evacuating horror of Hanks as Mister Conductor and his eyes, those eyes, those soulless empty merciless eyes, like a doll’s eyes.

Why not put a stripper’s-pole in every car, hire some dancers and start marketing “The Bachelor Party Express”? There must be some money in that. Maybe for pride month, run a train filled up with drag queens as “The Bosom Buddies Express”? If Ru-Paul can go mainstream, it can work. Anything’s better than to gaze into the twin black-hole abysses of Digital Tom Hanks’ Digitally Terrifying Face, the eyes of nothing, of no one, eyes from a plane so lacking in hope the people don’t even have a word for hopelessness, as they have never known the very idea of hope itself.

I mean, we couldn’t legally do a “Big Express”, too much creepy semi-statutory May-December “romance” in that trainwreck, I get freaked out by the pairing of a twelve-year-old child and a thirty-year-old woman in that flick, as I’m not a damn monster. However, it’d still be less awful to endure than a reflection of eldritch oblivion in the conductor-abomination’s face orbs.

Just raid a vintage shop and buy some chocolates. Instant “Forrest Gump Express”! Hire a few Tiki-style bartenders and a fire-pit, you are not that far away from staging “The Joe Versus The Volcano Express.” And then throw the Polar Express Conductor into the blazing pyre. Save the children, kill it with fire, kill it with fire! I’m just saying, the movie is creepy as hell.