On an unnamed island, in some corner that doesn’t appear on maps, an old, rusty train moved along tracks that disappeared into the horizon. There were no stations or passengers. Only the echo of its locomotive resonated in the thick air, heavy with the smell of the sea. In the smallest carriage, a ball rolled from side to side, obeying the train's erratic movements, as if it had a life of its own.

  On the roof of the train, two children whispered to each other. One was an Afghan boy who spoke of Kabul as if it were a distant dream, and the other, a boy with hair as white as the moon, whose laughter sounded like broken bells.

  "Do you think the sky is bigger in Afghanistan?" asked the boy with white hair.

  "The sky has no size," replied the Afghan, playing with a piece of glass that reflected light in strange shapes.

  "And death?"

  "It has no size either, but it weighs more."

  Meanwhile, the train continued to move toward the desert, which seemed to grow as it crossed it. Somewhere in the dining car, a doctor jotted notes in a bloodstained notebook. He had no patients, no instruments, only words that seemed out of place on the page.

  "Love: symptom or cure. End: point or continuation. Illness: circle or straight line."

  Someone touched the doctor’s shoulder. It was a man dressed like a pilot, although his uniform was covered in sand. He carried a broken compass in his hand and spoke in a language no one understood. The doctor nodded as if he understood, and continued writing.

  Elsewhere, a black car moved slowly along an invisible road, surrounded by a lunar landscape. The moon was not in the sky, but beneath its wheels. Every time the car moved, it left tracks that looked like craters. Inside the car, a woman in a red dress cried silently while holding a letter that had never been written.

  "Dear Jupiter, love is a disease I don’t know how to cure. But the end always comes too late. With sadness,

  The Moon."

  The car disappeared, and the letter lingered in the air before turning into sand.

  Back on the island, the children continued chatting as the train approached a bridge that seemed to lead nowhere. Below, the waves struck fiercely, as if trying to break the world into pieces. One of the children dropped the ball, which rolled to the edge of the roof and fell into the sea. But it didn’t sink. Instead, it bounced on the waves and began to inflate until it became something like an airplane.

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  "Shall we go?" asked the Afghan boy.

  "Let’s go," replied the other.

  They jumped onto the makeshift airplane, which took off without a sound, carrying them toward a sky filled with clouds that looked like fragments of forgotten stories. In one of those clouds, a train circled, its locomotive screeching as if singing a sad song.

  Inside the airplane, the children found a note on the pilot's seat:

  "Destination: Jupiter. Cargo: lost words."

  The airplane rose higher and higher, until the island became a tiny dot in the ocean. From there, they could see something strange: the island wasn’t alone. There were hundreds of islands around it, connected by bridges that led nowhere.

  Somewhere in Egypt, a doctor walked through a desert that never ended. He had left the train behind and was now following the tracks of a black car that vanished with the wind. In his hands, he held a broken compass, a triangular stone, and a letter written in a language that wasn’t his. The compass always pointed south, though the doctor knew that south didn’t exist in this place. He walked east.

  Suddenly, he found a ball buried in the sand. It was the same ball the children had dropped into the sea, but now it was burned, as if it had passed through a fiery atmosphere. When he touched it, he heard a voice.

  "Illness is a circle. The end is a straight line. And love... love is nothing more than a lost word, never to return and never..."

  The doctor dropped the ball and continued walking, while the dunes changed shape behind him, as if the desert were alive.

  The children never reached Jupiter. At some point during the flight, the airplane began to disintegrate, turning into words that floated in the air. The words joined the sky, forming constellations that meant nothing.

  The train continued its endless journey. In one of its carriages, the doctor had returned, now accompanied by the woman from the black car. She handed him the letter she had never written, and the doctor, in silence, placed it in his pocket.

  "Where is this train going?" she asked.

  "To the end," he replied.

  "And what’s there?"

  "Stories."

  At that moment, the train entered a dark tunnel, and the sound of the locomotive faded. The woman looked at the doctor, but he was no longer there. In his place, there was a ball gently bouncing, as if it were alive.

  The waterfalls fell, the birds began to sing, the trees rustled, and the animals stopped.

  In the sky, where the words formed constellations, someone wrote a final phrase:

  "Love is a disease that never ends, fall in love, love, and love them."

  The children, now floating in the void, saw the phrase and began to laugh. Their laughter echoed throughout the universe, mixing with the noise of the train, the sound of the sea, and the echo of the desert.

  And then, everything faded, and the end never came.