My English isn't good enough to translate my stories properly myself, so please forgive me if anything still sounds a little strange. This story was originally written in German and posted here some time ago. I’ve now done my best—with a little help from the internet—to bring it to an English-speaking audience as well. I hope the humor survives the journey across the language barrier... and that at least some of you find the idea of a brand-new form of public transportation being described primarily as a death trap as funny as I do. 😄 Enjoy your visit to Eisenhafen. And if you decide to take the suspension railway... Good luck. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome to Eisenhafen. Here, our scholars have invented something completely new: the suspension railway. A masterpiece of modern engineering, designed by men with far too much free time and nowhere near enough common sense. A marvel of technology, they say. Yes, of course. And why? Because there simply wasn't any room left for rails down on the street! Everything was already full. Horse-drawn carriages, merchants, flocks of vomiting seagulls, drunken sailors, drunken horses, and even drunker steam-coach drivers—you get the idea. There was no room left for anything else. So the engineers said: ‘Then we'll just hang the rails up there.’ Brilliant idea. Truly. Instead of being overcrowded and chaotic down below, it'll simply be overcrowded and life-threatening up here. And with passengers who'll be screaming all the way down if anything goes wrong. That's what they call progress. I call it job security for undertakers. Here, you're not just buying a ticket for the city's very first suspension railway. You're also getting a little loss of dignity—and possibly a complimentary decapitation courtesy of a loose screw. And there's already plenty happening at the station. At the ticket booth, there's a fellow who looks as if he's about to buy tickets for the apocalypse. He's muttering something about ‘first class’—as if there were classes of any kind in a moving sardine tin. Off to the side stands a lady with a parasol. Naturally, her complexion must be protected. Or perhaps the parasol is intended as an emergency parachute—though unfortunately, only for very small ladies. Or very optimistic ones. Watching her is a “gentleman.” He's staring at her with such dedication, you'd think she wasn't standing beneath a parasol, but displayed under a glass case in a natural history museum. All that's missing is a little sign saying: “Specimen: Lady. Delicious. Untouched by sunlight. Please do not feed.” The lady sitting on the bench is staring into space, mentally updating her will: “I leave my jewelry, my carpets, and my sanity to the first person brave enough to get on that thing.” Or perhaps she's watching the pigeons as if they were about to rewrite the Bible. Maybe she thinks those creatures know more than we do. Maybe they're time travelers. Maybe they're simply waiting for the suspension railway to crash so they can claim the crumbs of the catastrophe. A quiet, wordless conversation with a bird currently considering whether to shit on the “gentleman's” hat. The pigeons, however, have problems of their own. They're pecking around in the dirt, completely unimpressed by the city's first railway suspended in midair. They have more wisdom about the future in their tiny heads than all the engineers combined. Who knows? Maybe they're having a conversation in pigeon: “Say, Horst... what exactly is that thing supposed to be?” “No idea, Frieda. Looks like an upside-down coffin with windows.” “You think it flies?” “No. But I'm sure it'll crash beautifully.” They shrug their wings and keep eating. They know that the real future doesn't belong to technology. It belongs to crumbs. A particularly brave gentleman in a top hat is already getting on. Of course. There's always one with a top hat. He looks as if he's on his way to work—at a bank, perhaps. Or the Magicians' Society. Inside, he's probably thinking: “That thing will make two trips at most. After that, they'll be collecting the passengers with a shovel.” On the outside, however, he behaves as if this were a night at the opera—and not what is quite possibly the world's first freely suspended suicide machine. “Behold! I am a man of the future!” In reality, he's thinking: “If I survive this, I'll write a book. If I don't, the local newspaper will write a paragraph.” He stumbles, grabs hold of the door—and then pretends he was actually in the process of inventing a new kind of dance: The Eisenhafen Suspended Shuffle. Applause! No? Apparently not. Meanwhile, the officials are standing at a safe distance, their chests swollen with pride, shouting: “This is the beginning of a new era! Safe, efficient, and completely harmless!” —at precisely the moment when the first carriage above them makes a sound like an asthmatic whale that has swallowed a barrel organ. Let's be honest: The whole thing is absolute madness. A railway hanging in the air. Nobody wanted it. Everyone is afraid of it. And yet people cheer, buy tickets, and get on. Why? Because it shines. Because it hisses. Because it smells like the future. That, ladies and gentlemen, is progress! Progress sometimes means that instead of dying down in the dirt below, you can now fall elegantly from above. Welcome to Eisenhafen. Where progress doesn't roll. It hangs.