I don't like to think about the past. But I cannot stop remembering my son. Emma Nightingale prefers to remain grounded in reality as much as possible. Yet she's willing to indulge her nine year-old son Rupert's fascination with trains, as it brings him closer to his father, Gunnar, from whom she is separated. Once a month, Gunnar and Rupert venture out to follow the rails and watch the trains pass. Their trips have been pleasant, if uneventful, until one afternoon Rupert returns in tears. "The train tried to kill us," he tells her. Rupert's terror strikes Emma as merely the product of an overactive imagination. After all, his fears could not be based in reality, could they? Published here for the first time in English, "Where the Trains Turn" won first prize in the Finnish science-fiction magazine Portti's annual short story competition and then went on to win the Atorox Award for best Finnish science fiction or fantasy short story.
Author
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen is Finland’s best kept literary secret… In the early 70’s, when he was five, Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen lived in a block of flats by the Jyväskylä’s (a city in Central Finland) old cemetery and believed in vampires. In the early 80’s he still had vampire dreams and fell in love with Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Ten years later Pasi wrote his first short stories. He wan the writing competition of SciFi and fantasy stories four times and then decided to become a writer. Now he is an author, but he is also a Finnish and literature teacher in upper secondary school and the father of three sons. He hasn’t stopped loving vampires, Jeanne Moreau and old film classics.
