On the S-Train

(story makes mention of sexual violence and suicide)

"Damn, stupid window won't shut," said the first stranger, fiddling with the slide-lock. He hunched over the window for leverage, pulled the metal pin as far as it would go; it catapulted back and bit his finger. "Ow! Stupid thing," he pretended to himself. He was trying for the attention of the woman across from him - to start a conversation, to pass the time.

"Never does," she replied, unbothered. A regular to the 6:45 S-Train southbound. The yellow fog of the evening rubbed its back against the window pane, then moseyed in, lingered and malingered. Thick as a soaked dishrag slung over the side of a tin bucket, pungent as day-old dishwater. The fog hung low and dense with industrial malaise, clouded the strangers' features; it filtered slow and malignant through wetted trachea and paper-thin lungs.

The woman pulled down the frilled brim of her hat, and watched the life of the city pass beneath her, perfectly anonymous. Good samaritans and hucksters, gangsters and rapists, mothers and daughters, councilmen and day laborers, all the same. Rats copulating in grimy back-alleys, stray mutts lapping up the muck of necessity to keep them alive another day. These were miniatures in a snow globe to the woman's eye, distorting and distending through the murk, the haze of industry. They glowed only by whatever remnants of sunlight settled to the bottom.

"Tim," said the first stranger, extending his hand. The woman, about the same age, shrugged and met his hand in the middle. "Alice," she replied flatly.

"Can't spell 'malice' without 'Alice'," Tim said. "Huh," Alice said, and discomfiting silence. Tim saw himself the Idiot. He watched his remark plunk dead as an aneurysm, and had to revive it. "You know, there's no fog in London, actually. London fog," he coughed, "it's a reference to the industrial age. The smog and all that... So- we're breathing in poison."

"We're not in London." Silence, again. Tim forced out another cough. "But this," he said, "a bit much for the evening, no?" Alice diverted her gaze to the other passengers. A man fiddling with his shoelaces. A woman weeping. A few dead-eyed stares into the leaden abyss. Some huddled by the glow of their phones. Dearth and poverty pervaded the scene. Alice wondered idly how many of them would be able to tell she had a penis. "Eh," she muttered to herself.

"What's that?" Tim started in, a bit too eager. Alice's unamusement bordered on hostile. Her look pierced through the cloud that separated the two, and Tim was compelled by the strangest of feelings, something he hadn't felt since he moved to the city: he thought he might recognize this stranger from somewhere - maybe by the way her eyebrows framed her face, flat and humorless, or the familiar bottom lip, pursed in a downward curl.

Alice turned back to the window, and the dread of recognition vanished, light as a coincidence. Tim shrugged. In a moment, he held his arms out and examined them. Flesh darkened nearly to scarlet by years of hard labor. Flesh ink-tainted. Flesh abused by scars, scars he wore without pride or shame, only indifference, as flat as the fact of his own name.

-

Far, far from the city, in Greensfield, Kentucky, nineteen-year-old Annie Sank fretted her every movement. She felt herself a fledgling, weightless bird, a rock teetering on the crag above. Any false step meant certain death. The girl could have been doing anything. Shopping for a new outfit. Taking a walk to pass the day. Bathing, raising her leg, feeling the subtly shifting line between hot water and cold air. Smoking herself in or out of a panic attack. Everything, everything carried the potential for danger.

As it was, Annie was at her job at the local grocery, examining heads of cabbage. Moving the freshest to the front of the display, disposing of any that showed the slightest sign of browning. The thin line between fertility and rot filled her mind. She pitched the bad ones with the faintest sense of guilt.

"Excuse me," said a man behind her. "Do you work here?" Annie continued on, oblivious. Good. Bad. Bad. Good. "Excuse me." Yep. Nope. This little one, cute, a bit unripe yet - tuck it in the back. This one, blooming, full, boldly green. She felt the texture of its leaves in her palm, its thick veins, sensuous and bulging, a bit ticklish. Annie thought of pan-frying, odor rising, teeth gnashing, and- wham!

"My God, my fucking nose!" the man shrieked, now bent over in front of Annie. The cabbage lay on the ground, soaked in a deluge of red, pouring swift as from a busted faucet. Such was the startle of a single tap on the shoulder than Annie Sank swung her whole body around and backhanded the man with all her force. The cabbage plunked with so many 'I'm sorry's to forgive the world's sins twice-over.

-

Tim had bit his fingernails down so far that there was only skin left to pull off by the edges of his teeth. "It's an unconscious thing, really," he said to Alice, who paid no mind. "I've been doing it since, well, before I could even remember. My mom, peach she was, used to put cayenne pepper on the fingertips to get me to stop. Slapped me around once or twice. I'd still keep on, though. Just one of those things, I guess."

"One of what things."

"The things we do without really considering it. Poor coping mechanisms, or something."

"Huh."

"Sorry, I'm a nervous talker."

"Huh." The train chugged along through the choked-up ends of the industrial district, came out the other end in evening twilight. The fog slowly dissipated. Alice kept on looking out the window - eyeing the myriad stories that, once she exited, she would become engulfed in. Just another part of the elaborate cross-stitch of the city, another dispensable thread. There was something deeply calming in that, viewing the world that way. Is that why she moved here?- perhaps not in the direct, immediate sense, but as part of a larger war with the world, to never be seen, recognized again?

"Would you stop looking at me?" she declared, eyes still glued to the half-shut window. Tim muttered an apology, averted his gaze shamefully. He couldn't place where he knew that look from. Was it the mole, bottom of her left cheek, couched just above the jawline?

Alice's phone rang. It was her sister. "Yes, dear?" she said.

"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God." Always exasperated. Alice rolled her eyes. "What is it," she said, deadpan.

"I just- I just- I just-"

"Spit it out."

"This guy, he just, I didn't see he was behind me, and- and- well, I was just there stocking the cabbages, and he came up behind me, and-"

"Did you kill him?" On cue: audible sobbing. Tim didn't want to eavesdrop. He watched his reflection in the window, frowning. New beard, hair pulled down over his eyes - he could almost tolerate it. He looked like a new person almost. Except for that wicked scar under his left eye, from when-

"I hit him, I swear it was an accident, I swear it was an accident. It was just one of those - breathe, Annie, breathe - just one of those things, you know? You don't know why you did it, you just did. I feel so, so, so - God, I'm so sorry for calling you, I just feel so bad, and the guy, he was so sweet after, and I hit him, I hit him."

"Just breathe, dear."

"He didn't deserve it."

"Just breathe."

"I hate hurting people. I hate hate hate-"

"Just breathe." In time, Alice got Annie to calm down enough to hang up. "Sorry about that," she said, to Tim, or whoever else was around that might've endured the hysterics. "Friend?" Tim asked. "Sister," Alice replied. "She's a bit, uh, frantic. Hit some guy in the face with a cabbage or something. Actually kinda funny."

"A cabbage?" Alice nodded and chuckled a bit. For the first time, Tim's face came into full view, and she thought it something vaguely familiar. Not a feeling common to the city, where people kept their eyes down and to themselves. Running beneath his left eye, she spotted the scar. "She get you, too?" Alice joked.

"Oh, this?- Prison. Actually, saw somebody nearly beat a guy to death with a Jello cup." Alice snorted. "No," she pled.

"Really. Smashed it into his eye, over and over, couldn't tell red from red. Orbital fracture. Spent a week- no, two- in the ER."

"What were you in prison for- sorry."

"No, it's fine. Armed robbery... I was- I was a stupid kid. One of those things, you know, don't think about it much, you just do it, and well..." Alice shrugged. She didn't care much one way or the other.

"People are people," she said.

"People are people." A satisfied silence fell on the scene. Alice went back to looking out the window, and soon, the train ground to a halt. Her stop. She had grown to appreciate the stranger's company: one of those random happenings that come and go without consequence, that you store for later humor. There was something to meeting people you'll never speak to again that she liked. Another thing about the city: no-stakes encounters.

"Alice... Alice Sank, Greensfield, Kentucky," she said, hand outstretched before her departure. Tim met it in the middle, but at the breadth of the realization, his own hand fell limp and cold. Allan Sank. A shiver seized his body. Her brother. He felt naked, exposed, full of the most indomitable fear. As Alice left, he pulled his hair over his eyes, pretending sheepishly, but the terror gripped him, threatened to rip him asunder, limb by limb.

Even here... Even here, so far away...

-

The cabbages were gone, the blood mopped up. Annie Sank was home, but could not elude the most inscrutable panic. Panic of guilt and the inability to atone. She was well acquainted with pain being inflicted upon her, and had made amends with that; to transfer it to someone else was an intolerable fact she could not overcome. Not what she had said earlier. It was not one of those things. It could not be one of those things. If people couldn't take responsibility for the hurt they caused, then who in the world would?

The girl pulled herself off her bed with the greatest exertion she could muster. She drew a bath. Three razor blades lay on the sink basin. She slipped into the tub and reached for one, but it was too high, too far off. The water pulled her down, inch by inch until her nostrils were submerged, but she came up coughing. There was no reprieve here. All the pain in the world co-mingled and conspired to fall from the teetering crag, on the back of one fledgling little bird, barely registerable on a scale. Annie would have done anything to lay that hurt to rest, even if it meant her total defunction, demoralization, death by the boulder that fell from above.

-

GREENSFIELD MESSENGER

AUGUST 11, 2014

GREENSFIELD - A 19-year-old man was sentenced this week for charges related to the rape of a nine-year-old girl.

Liam Timothy James, Greensfield, was charged with rape, a first-degree felony, and gross sexual imposition, (GSI), a fourth-degree felony, in the Jackson County Court of Common Pleas this January after the brother of the victim reported witnessing James performing acts of a sexual nature on the young girl. He pled guilty in July.

"I- I- I-” James stuttered during his sentencing hearing, fighting back sobs. “I didn’t mean to, I mean, I’m really sorry, I’m so, so sorry.” He was ultimately given a maximum sentence of ten years, reducible to seven.

The victim, identified in court documents only as A.S., declined to give a victim statement prior to the sentencing, and was not present. Her parents, who were there, broke into tears after the sentence was read. Her mother had to be restrained by court officials.

“You (expletive) monster, you should be six feet underground, you calculating (expletive) monster.” …

-

Did she recognize me?

Alice Sank was gone, but her ghost remained on the southbound train. Tim was frozen. He felt anguish in one moment, raw paranoia the next. He huddled next to the window, his face turned to his shirt sleeve to protect himself. He had a handgun stored in a shoebox underneath his bed, and for a second, had elected on suicide. But when the train came to his stop, nighttime descending, he felt himself unable to move. He instead sat, hands over his ears, eyes closed, breathing only when he reached the brink of fainting. This way, the world could continue to be a hostile and unknowable place, the mercurial black box that it was, without him in it. He could assume no responsibility, continue on as an anonymous passenger the rest of his life.

But what if she comes back?

"Please, please, please," he muttered to himself, to shut everything else out. "Please, please, please." In several hours, near dawn, the train looped and returned to the industrial district. The yellow fog came with it, heavy and odorous, irritating his throat. He coughed, and coughed again. The window wouldn't shut. The window wouldn't shut.