Vixen - Jia Lissa - Travelling Alone -

The train crested a hill. Below, a small town glittered like spilled sequins—warm windows, a single church spire, a river catching the last of the light. Jia’s stop. Or maybe just the first one that mattered.

She’d told herself this trip was about “finding material.” A dancer’s sabbatical. But the truth was simpler and sharper: she needed to be a stranger. In Prague, in Budapest, in the tiny, unpronounceable town whose name she’d booked on a whim, no one knew her stage name. No one expected the arch of her back or the practiced softness of her gaze. Here, she was just a girl with a heavy suitcase and a passport full of empty pages.

And for the first time all journey, Jia Lissa wasn’t hiding. She was arriving. Vixen - Jia Lissa - Travelling Alone

“It’s the way you hold your book,” Vixen replied, nodding at the untouched paperback in Jia’s lap. “Upside down for the last three stops. You’re not reading. You’re hiding.”

The train compartment smelled of rust, stale coffee, and the particular loneliness of a border crossing at dusk. Jia Lissa pressed her forehead against the cold glass, watching the industrial outskirts of the last city blur into skeletal trees. Outside, the map was ending. Inside, she was just beginning. The train crested a hill

Vixen reached across the narrow gap and gently turned Jia’s face back toward the darkening landscape. “That’s the wrong question,” she murmured. “The right one is: what’s our story for tonight? ”

A flush crept up Jia’s neck. She righted the novel—some pretentious thing she’d bought at a station kiosk—and set it aside. “Maybe I like watching the world go backwards.” Or maybe just the first one that mattered

Vixen smiled. It was a small, dangerous curve of the mouth. “The world doesn’t go backwards. Only we do. Trying to outrun a version of yourself you left in a different time zone?”