by Terri Dixon
The next discovery that I made is that Russian trains are great. The only thing that I’d ever heard about them had been from my grandmother. She’d traveled the country in the 1990’s when the big transition from Communism to whatever I was dealing with at the time had been in process. She had her own stories to tell. It would have been great if I could have shared my adventures with her when I got home—if I got home. I really wished that she was still alive. I had so many things to tell her. I had so many questions to ask her. I hoped that she wasn’t the only one who could answer my questions. There were so many things that I wanted to know.
I had to know how the Romanov’s ended up in Indiana. I had to know if there were any other members of the direct bloodline around. I’d never really sought out family before. I wondered if there were others. There could be. Several generations had passed since Anastasia Romanov had disappeared. There were partial Romanov’s all over the place. They lived in Austria and Britain. Some of them were royalty to this day. I hoped that my mother knew something that would help me sort out the details of my existence. I hoped that I would be able to get home and start talking with my mother about it.
Long gone were the Soviet trains that my grandma had told me about. There were no unlivable bathrooms. There was a dining car and a bar car. My cabin was a sleeper, and it was comfortable. Tania and I had a two person sleeper. Boris took the cabin next to us. There was a table next to the window in our cabin. I sat looking out the window at the frozen countryside. As we were pulling out of the train station, I saw the monster Humvee go four wheeling across the fields.
I was too exhausted to think anymore. I laid down and went to sleep.
The Ring of the Queen
