The Man on Platform Six

The first time he spoke to me, my keys were already in the ignition.

“Wait,” he said. “Count to three before you turn it.”

It was midnight in the parking garage, the kind of place where even your own footsteps sound like someone else’s. He stood one row over, in an old wool coat, watching me like I was the last bus of the night.

“One,” he said. “Two. Three.”

I turned the key. The engine coughed to life just as a black SUV shot down the lane—wrong way, tires screaming. If I’d been reversing, we would’ve collided at full speed. Instead, the SUV clipped a concrete post and spun out, metal shrieking, sparks flying.

I looked for the man. He was already walking toward the stairwell. I sprinted after him, but when I rounded the corner, the hall was empty. No doors. No footsteps. Just the echo of my breath.

The second time, he was waiting on Platform Six.

I was late for work, the kind of morning where coffee burns your tongue and everything feels five seconds behind. He stood across the tracks, coat buttoned, hands folded. He tilted his head as though we already knew each other.

“The next train,” he called. “Don’t get on it.”

The crowd surged forward when the train pulled in. I almost did too—routine is a current hard to swim against. At the last moment, I stepped back. The doors closed without me.

Five minutes later, an announcement cracked over the loudspeaker: that train had stopped two stations up. A jumper. A long delay. I stared across the tracks, but the man was gone.

That night, I wrote both warnings down on index cards and slid them under the cutlery tray in my kitchen drawer, as if hiding them could make the strangeness stay in one place.

The third time, I was at the crosswalk on Clay and Ninety-Third.

“Do not cross on the green,” he said, suddenly beside me.

The walk sign blinked on. The crowd stepped forward. I stayed put.

A panel van roared through the red light, horn blaring, coffee flying from the driver’s hand. It would have flattened anyone in its path. The skateboarder in front of me dropped his board. A woman in a mustard coat shrieked and stumbled backward. The van clipped a cone and disappeared into traffic.

When I turned, the man was already walking away.

After that, the warnings multiplied.

Little instructions, precise as recipes: On the day the snow turns to rain, step back from the curb. When you hear sirens and a children’s song at the same time, find a doorway. Don’t stay late at work on Tuesday.

Every time, something grazed me instead of killing me. A falling branch split the air where I’d stood seconds before. A beer bottle smashed against a bench instead of my head. A bent metal sign fell inches from my cheek.

I started keeping a calendar of the things that didn’t happen to me. I marked the days with little stars. Every star meant I’d stolen a day from fate.

But it didn’t feel like living anymore. It felt like waiting.

The fourth warning came as a note under my apartment door at 2 a.m.

Do not answer when your mother calls at 4:08 a.m. Let it ring.

At 4:08, my phone buzzed. My mother often called when she couldn’t sleep—half the time to talk about nothing. I picked up out of spite.

“Mara?” she whispered, voice shaking. “The smoke alarm keeps chirping. I think I smell something.”

I told her to go outside and call 911. Minutes later, her kitchen was engulfed in flames. She survived, wrapped in a blanket on the curb, sobbing.

I didn’t keep that note. I burned it in the sink and watched the words disintegrate.

For a month, he didn’t appear.

Then, on a rainy Tuesday, I found him at the river walk.

“It is today,” he said, handing me a folded map. A small X was drawn in thin pen. “In fifteen minutes, a police boat will lose power and crash into the boathouse pylons. The crowd will panic. A woman in a red scarf will be trampled—unless you stand here.”

I obeyed.

The boat’s engine sputtered, died. The vessel drifted, officers scrambling. People surged toward the stairs. Panic spread like fire.

“Stop!” I shouted. My voice cracked through the chaos. “Move to the right—slowly. Hands up if you’re with a child. Stay calm.”

Somehow, they listened. The woman with the red scarf stumbled but was caught by three strangers. A father clutched his baby, crying silently. The crowd flowed toward safety instead of crushing itself.

Then a boy slipped on the wet stone at the base of the stairs. His head cracked against the step, blood bright against the rain. His mother screamed.

I knelt in the water and pressed my hands to the wound. “Stay with me,” I begged. His eyelids fluttered like broken shutters. I kept him awake until paramedics arrived.

When I looked up, the man in the coat stood at the top of the stairs.

“Don’t follow me,” he said.

Of course, I did.

He led me into a dark corridor near the boathouse. No one else was there.

“Why me?” I demanded.

He turned, rain dripping from his hair. His face was both young and old, unremarkable and unforgettable.

“You picked me,” he said. “You asked me to keep you. Not safe. Not happy. Just… kept. Long enough to reach the day you could decide what to spend yourself on.”

The word spend rattled through me.

“What happens if I stop listening?”

“Something happens anyway,” he said. “But not this.”

Then he pushed through the exit door and was gone.

Later, a photograph appeared online. It showed me kneeling by the bleeding boy, hands red. In the corner of the frame, a shadowed figure in a coat climbed the stairs. His face was blurred, as if the camera itself had agreed to keep his secret.

I saved the photo. But I stopped drawing stars on my calendar.

Two months later, at dawn, I saw him again on Platform Six.

“The worst thing,” he said, “is not yet to come.”

I waited.

“It almost never is,” he continued. “It’s almost always the thing you’ve already done. Don’t let it be the thing you already did.”

The train arrived. He lifted a hand, not quite a wave. His train left. Mine came. I got on.

I still live with his warnings. I still glance both ways leaving my apartment, still step back from curbs when the weather changes. But I understand now: his warnings weren’t about surviving. They were about time—about how long I could borrow before I had to spend it.

Sometimes, late at night, I wonder what would’ve happened if I hadn’t listened the first time in that garage. Maybe I would’ve died. Or maybe something worse would’ve survived in my place—the version of me that wastes every chance, that lets the worst thing be the thing already done.

And sometimes I still dream of him—standing on a platform, coat buttoned, watching me like he knows exactly when I’ll need him again.