Thirteen

Now, in the evenings, the eldest of the miners' sons stood at the train tracks with beers and bags of glue and watched with sadness and spite the happy faces roar by every thirty minutes. They fondled their cousins' tits under baggy Aran jumpers and ran across the tracks in front of the speeding train, their soft hair whipped by the near miss. They threw bottles of piss at the windows, and when the driver let fly his angry horn, they felt seen by the world, they felt alive.