Nine Trains
- A man with one earbud in, the other one dangling, like he is half-listening to a city and half-listening to a private weather.
- The woman across from me is reading a paperback whose cover has been wrapped in brown paper. I will not know what she is reading. This is the most generous thing she has done for any of us.
- Two boys with a skateboard between their knees. They are not talking. The skateboard is somehow the conversation.
- An older woman, gloved, with a small box on her lap. She holds it the way you would hold a cat that may decide to leap.
- Somewhere down the car a child is asking how much longer. The mother says, gently, the same amount longer as last time you asked. The child accepts this. It is, I think, a satisfying answer.
- The lights flicker. We pretend they did not.
- A teenager has fallen asleep against the window. The window has not minded.
- We pass through a station without stopping. Someone on the platform looks up at us as if we are weather.
- My stop. I will not see any of these people again. We were briefly an arrangement. Now we are returning to being strangers, which is the resting state of nearly everyone, which is not, I think, sad.
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