At 11:57 p.m., long after the livestock barns close, Mr. Fenton leans into his glass kingdom of plywood mountains and plastic pines. He straightens a red boxcar, checks the tiny station clock (permanently 5:12), and nudges a cattle truck toward the painted prairie. Outside the window wall, the fairground hum is distant; inside, he rules three time zones at once: desert in the west pane, wheatfields in the center, snow-peaked valley to the east.
Every night he runs the schedule he wrote at twelve, freight westbound, passenger east, mail on the siding, because a railway on paper never quite throbbed the way a HO-gauge engine does under a fingertip. Kids press faces to the glass, spotting secrets he tucked in the scenery: a lemonade stand, a sleeping coyote, a plastic fisherman who never catches anything. Mr. Fenton smiles, flips the transformer, and the whole country rolls forward exactly one inch; just enough, he thinks, to keep the real world on track.
