Seat 14

The train was packed like a recurring nightmare on its 6:15 AM journey.

The air was thick with a mysterious blend of damp paper, cheap perfume, and the remnants of truncated dreams whose endings were never reached.

Shoulders pressed together without affection, eyes extinguished as if their owners had been torn from another life against their will.

Martin Castle, thirty-four years old, a sales employee at an electrical appliances company.

He sat in seat 14 by the window, as he did every morning, and lifted his brown leather briefcase onto his lap.

His right hand trembled faintly from too much caffeine and exhaustion.

His morning routine was a pale shadow of former versions:

Waking before dawn to a shrieking alarm, a quick gulp of coffee swallowed standing up, passing a mirror without looking, then a dash to catch the train.

He opened his phone.

A repeated message from his manager… No need to read it.

The same message, in different words: *Yesterday’s report is insufficient. Review the client list. We expect more from you.*

He sighed, closed his phone silently, leaned his head against the glass, and closed his eyes for a moment—or imagined he did.

When he opened his eyes, the world wasn’t entirely different, yet it was no longer the same. The same seat, the same smell, but the air felt denser, like a transparent layer had slid between him and reality.

He closed his eyes and opened them again.

He began to look around, at the faces he saw every day without ever recalling their details—just features filling the background.

The woman sitting opposite him wore garish lipstick, a faded pink coat, and carried a knockoff designer handbag. That wasn’t strange… He could have overlooked all that, except she had the head of a gazelle. Wide, nervous eyes glistened as if in perpetual flight.

Martin froze. He swallowed hard.

Beside him, a man in his forties was reading the newspaper with unnatural focus—the business section. He wore a grey suit, but above the collar… was the head of a pig.

Yes—a broad, wet snout, a mouth constantly chewing, eyes watching from behind the paper.

In the opposite corner, an elegant man with a precise tie.

His features were composed, but they ended with the head of an owl, staring with an unbearable, cold silence.

And there, a burly man with the head of a bull breathing heavily, staring at Martin for a long time without reason, as if waiting for him to apologize for existing.

Martin gripped the side handle.

He felt his heartbeat accelerate, as if something inside him was pounding to get out.

*Is this real?*

*Have I lost my mind?*

He began to say this to himself.

He tried to convince himself he was dreaming. That he was still in a brief doze, that the 6:15 hadn’t departed yet.

He pinched himself—the pain was sharp. Everything was real… *too* real.

He began to breathe deeply… and feigned calm.

He stared at the windowpane, trying to see his own face. Had it changed too?

He raised a hand to touch his face.

His nose was as it was… his forehead… his chin… himself… or so he wanted to believe.

All the faces had changed… yet no one seemed surprised.

He dragged himself to the office.

The gleaming building was as usual… but today it seemed like a broken reflection in an old mirror.

The corners were sharper, doors closed with a sinister slowness, voices echoed endlessly.

His manager, with his upright posture and cutting voice,

who spoke as if counting others' breaths…

Approached him today with measured steps, and a face that was no longer a face.

He had the head of a wolf. Unblinking eyes, a mouth that didn’t open yet inhaled the air harshly.

"Good morning, Martin," he said without turning.

Martin entered the office at roughly the same time.

He passed Louis, the one who never stopped smiling as if it were a duty. Today, he looked like a hyena.

His laugh seemed predatory, holding neither warmth nor naivety, but something strange between stupidity and cunning.

Then Daniel… who started every week with a new complaint:

About the weather, the clients, the coffee… He had become a rooster.

Strutting back and forth around his desk, chattering loudly. No one listened, and he didn’t seem to notice.

Martin nodded to them as he always did, but something was different.

When he sat at his desk and looked around again…

He looked at Amanda, who never lifted her eyes from the papers.

The same mechanical movements, the same gaze that didn’t see *you*, but passed *over* you—and in that moment, she bore the head of an eagle. Silent, sharp, staring down as if you were merely a number.

And appearing from behind the partition was Linda…

Who didn’t say much, but emerged suddenly whenever the manager was near, speaking in a cautious tone—her face had taken on the head of a peacock. Colorful, adorned, spreading its feathers at just the right moment.

A recurring client who talked much but listened little, demanded without thanks, possessed the head of a small parasite clinging to the skins of others as if feeding off them without apology.

Martin tried to ignore it all. He opened his computer, but he couldn’t read…

Words dissolved, shifted, vanished. Faces everywhere. Heads. Voices. Breaths.

No one else seemed to notice what was happening.

Was he the only one who could see?

By the end of the workday, Martin sat like a postponed corpse in his chair, watching the clock hands that seemed to move away rather than draw near. He no longer felt his body, nor heard his colleagues' words… as if they were chattering in a glass room where sound couldn’t penetrate.

When he left the office,

He carried not just his briefcase, nor the reports, nor his polite voice.

He carried their gazes, their actions, their fluctuations, their arrogance, their weakness, their chaos…

All those heads that remained unseen until life fell silent around you.

He didn’t speak to anyone. Didn’t say goodbye to anyone. He walked in silent steps towards the restroom. Turned on the tap, wet his face, then raised his eyes to the mirror.

It was him.

No fangs, no feathers, no horns. Just Martin, as he knew himself.

But his face seemed strange to him nonetheless…

Not because it had changed, but because it was now the only face left.

The only human face amidst a herd of concealed visages.

He left the restroom like someone stepping out of a scene he didn’t yet understand.

He headed back to the train, seeking a different ending by returning to the start.

He boarded the carriage, sat in the same seat—14 by the window.

He leaned his head against the glass, closed his eyes.

Breathed slowly…

One… two… three…

Opened his eyes.

Nothing had changed.

The same air, the same smell, the same head of the economics man reading the newspaper with his pig snout, the same unblinking owl, the same frightened gazelle in the pink coat. The massive bull with its heavy breathing and angry stare—they were all here. Their heads remained unchanged.

He closed his eyes again…

Opened them… Once, twice, five, ten times.

No use.

He remained seated as if trapped between two times, belonging to neither.

He pulled his body back, sinking into the seat.

He thought to himself: *"Am I the mad one, or am I the only one still trying to remain human?*

*Is this the truth, or have I not yet woken from some nightmare?*

*And if I’m still asleep, why is my heart trembling like this?"*

A heavy inner silence.

Resignation seeped into him like water under a door.

He no longer wanted to understand anything. No answers. No questions.

No one got off. No one got on.

Time was frozen, suspended between silent ticking and unopened doors.

He sat there, among the seats, still and quiet.

He no longer tried to close his eyes. No longer waited for anything to shift.

He looked at them—at their heads—without shock, without questions, without resistance.

They were all there, as they were.

There was no terror in his eyes, nor curiosity, only a strange calm.

As if he had realized—without analysis, without needing to comprehend—that some truths aren’t explained, they are seen.

And *this* was the truth that had been staring at him all along.

They weren’t masks. They weren’t borrowed heads.

They *were* their heads.

He felt something collapse inside him.

His spirit relinquished its last attempt at understanding.

He exhaled a deep sigh, like someone emptying the remnants of his humanity…

But the sound that emerged was unfamiliar—a strange, coarse, hollow breath.

He turned fluidly towards the window glass.

He saw a head striped black and white.

A long face, with still eyes unlike his own.

A zebra staring back at him from the glass.

He glanced around.

No one was surprised.

No one whispered.

No one turned to look at him.

As if… they had seen him this way from the beginning.

He leaned his head back again.

Closed his eyes.

He was no longer watching the scene; he had become part of it.