I was halfway down the stairs of the UIC-Halsted station when I heard it—the voice of Lee Crooks blaring across the gray platform, sealing my fate: “Doors Closing.” I sighed as the Blue Line train hastily pulled from the station, leaving me and a fellow crowd of backpacked, red-nosed students shivering in its wake. I thumped down the stairs and took my frigid stance beside them, opposite of the roar of 90-94 across the tracks, beyond the tall wired fence. So bleak, I thought to myself, glancing once at the tiny info-screen that hung above the entryway to the platform. The soonest another train would be arriving was eighteen minutes. I gritted my teeth, trying to ignore how red my knuckles already were, how my nipples ached even under the layers of my coat. I had been warned about windy Chicago winters, and yet I had still foolishly hoped that they would turn out differently from those I had experienced in The Region—the armpit of Northwest Indiana. I huffed to myself under the bundles of wool, the fake fur lining my hood. At least I had thought to wear it on this murky February afternoon.
A short man beside me had done the same, wearing muted colors and a bomber hat lined with white fur. The boy beside him—my age, a college student—hadn’t been as thoughtful. He was wearing red basketball shorts and a light gray hoodie—not meant for this climate. I briefly wondered what college he went to, what major he was. His long face was skeptical—probably a marketing student.
Seventeen minutes.
The people around him were each uniquely faceless. A tall, wiry man wearing dark purple lipstick. A girl with bright red tennis shoes, a red beret to match. Two college boys holding hands as their free thumbs texted away. Another couple sat silently on the enclaved bench, swallowed by the swaying horde of grayness. There was an olive-skinned man leaning against the staircase, gazing out across the highway with something that looked suspiciously like a plastic doll’s foot sticking out of the front pocket of his hoodie. Beside him— not with him, but nearby—a black-haired girl was propped against the wall. She was thin, lanky, swathed in an ocean of a sweatshirt, beige sweeping over linty black leggings. She was only wearing socks. One was striped, black and orange. The other was fuzzy, a polka-dotted rainbow. She had earbuds in; if I listened closely, over the howling of the Windy City, I could hear the lull—an echo, some transcendent reflection of thumps and rifts. She was facing away from me, staring straight across the tracks—not at the highway, not at the fence, but somewhere beyond them.
What is she looking at? I turned away when the man with the doll’s foot looked up, nearly catching my eye, and quickly flashed my attention back toward the info-screen.
Fifteen minutes.
I audibly blew air through my lips, rocking gently back and forth on my heels—enough to keep warm, but subtle enough not to disrupt the fragile peace before me. The man in the bomber hat shot me an accusatory glance, which I readily ignored as he reached into his pocket for a Bic and lit up a cigarette.
“Got one for me?” I asked, cracking a smile. An attempt at small talk, as the smoke furled around me. My hair would smell later, and so would my jacket.
“What are you—thirteen?” was all he said, and I thought about mentioning that I was wearing heels longer than his dick. Instead, I took an easy step away from him. I knew better than to challenge people on the CTA.
Thirteen minutes.
I tried to shut out the lingering reek of smoke and cold, freezing like an icicle around me until I could think of nothing else. I tried to think of Jackson, still stuck in Biology until three-thirty; had he fallen asleep in class again? Had he eaten something before he went, after rushing to class on three hours of sleep? I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone, hissing at my raw knuckles. But I smiled when I saw his face, nothing more than a picture, pop up in the upper left-hand corner of my screen.
I’m starting to think this is all dog-shit, I read, What the fuck even is science?
Who the hell decides this stuff? Who NAMES it?
Eleven minutes.
I chuckled to myself, earning another weary look from the man in the bomber hat. I thought about how I would tell Jackson how funny he had looked, so short and gray, with such a wide mouth and empty brown eyes like diner coffee. It warmed me thinking of him, about how when I got off this train, I would see him. Meet him in front of the science building on Wabash Avenue. Muss his hair, even as he swatted my hand away. Kiss his cheek. Ask him how class was, head down to dinner, retreat back into the safety of his apartment . . .
What is it? I typed back.
My phone immediately lit up with his response. “Frontiers in perception.” How it’s all different. Bullshit like that.
I frowned at the screen, fingers whirling. You don’t believe that?
Left is left, right is right. Blue is blue and green is green, he replied. It’s all the same for everyone.
I didn’t think I agreed, but I was too cold to argue. Sucks. I’ll be on the train soon, I wrote back, my fingers pausing; Your turn to pick dinner tonight.
Nine minutes.
I slid my phone back into the pocket of my coat, preparing to fall again into that cozy daydream, to ignore that mountain of literature that was spread across my desk in my dorm downtown . . . When I saw that black-haired girl, so still, so quiet and so blank, jolt awake—as if struck by those same volts that powered the tracks before us. I stared at her out of the corner of my eye, watching as she, without a single backward glance, lowered herself onto the yellow line that streaked down the platform. The danger zone, and she was sitting right in its threshold, her legs dangling precariously over the edge of the concrete.
Something in my chest twisted at that. I turned nervously to the clock.
Eight minutes.
I looked at the man in the bomber hat. He was still puffing away at his cigarette, but his eyes followed mine. When our gazes met this time, he did not scoff. He merely stared at me, blinked once, as if asking the same innate question, then flitted his stare back to her—this girl in a flimsy hoodie and mismatched socks, blaring music so loud that I could hear it from yards away. His eyes then snapped back to mine, asking, She’ll move, right? She’ll move when she sees the train coming? If she stayed, her legs would be sheared clean off—if the train didn’t take her first.
Seven minutes.
Yes, I decided for us. She’ll move when the train comes. She just wanted to sit down . . . Satisfied, I reached back into my pocket, readying to respond to Jackson’s retort that it was actually I who would be choosing dinner—when I heard a loud THUMP! My heart stopped. My hand froze. As if I knew before I even saw her.
My eyes shot up toward the tracks, to the place where the girl had just been seated. But she was no longer sitting on that yellow line, legs suspended, but below it. Below the platform. Standing between the iron rails. Completely still.
Six minutes.
The other migrants on the platform were starting to stare. Open mouths. Wrinkled brows. Crinkled noses. Not one of them moved. They merely stared, murmuring amongst themselves, shifting in place. Uncomfortable. Uneasy. The wave of tension coursed through me, freezing me to the core as the wind howled through the station. If the girl noticed it, she didn’t let on. She merely stood there, dazed, before slowly beginning to twirl to that voiceless melody thrumming from her earbuds. I could only watch, staring open-mouthed as she began to dance, oblivious to the dozens of stares, to the promise of death that stalked her from down the tracks. I wanted to say something. I wanted to shout at her. But what was I supposed to say? What could I?
“Girl!” the man in the bomber hat barked from beside me. “The train is coming.”
Five minutes.
“Girl!” he called again when she ignored him. “The train is coming.”
My mind raced as she danced on, twirling and twirling, while the silence grew louder around us. What to do . . . What to do . . . What can I do? Can I call someone? I could. There had to be someone, some officer or supervisor to call, to get down to this platform and help her out. Drag her out. But as I sent a sideways glance down the tracks, I could see the train far ahead, parked two stations down. Would the call get there in time? Would someone get here in time? No. No, they wouldn’t.
“The train!” the man with the bomber hat said again. Didn’t she even hear him? Or did she, and she merely added his voice to the rhythm of her waltz?
I looked around me once more. No one was moving. No one was coming. Down the line, the train was moving again.
Four minutes.
I had to do something. Something—even if I didn’t know what it was. I recognized her paracosm, so bright against this stony winter horizon; I knew that dreamworld all too well, and how long I had longed for someone to knock on its front door.
I took a tentative step toward the tracks. “Hey,” I called to her, softly. I tried to hide the alarm, the panic, the building sense of dread pooling in the pit of my stomach. When the train hit her, would it throw her ahead into the darkening tunnel beyond, or would it merely sweep her under, burying her beneath the tracks? “The train is coming,” I repeated, louder. I didn’t know how else to say it, how else to tell her that if she didn’t move, she was going to die.
Those eyes, so elegantly slanted, a brown so deep that they were nearly black— they stared straight ahead as she continued to twirl. Blind to me, blind to the man in the bomber hat, blind to the station packed full of gawking Chicagoans. Blind to the train only a stop away. “Doors closing”—I could hear that automated voice now, the train preparing to leave the platform. Would the passengers hear the impact of her body, plastered across the front of the train? Would it rattle them, shake them, cause those rickety tin cars to pause and take a breath? Or would her death be silent, a muffled bump on the road, or a forgotten possum on the side of the expressway?
Three minutes.
She twirled again and, for a moment, I caught the curve of her face—a child, no older than myself. Her lips were parted in bliss—as if the temporary agony of the present was relieved by whatever daydream she was living. What had trapped her there? What had done it? The nine-to-five? Student loans? The news? Something so deep and so personal that I could never begin to understand?
My stomach lurched forward. Another foot toward the edge of the platform. Then another.
“Hey,” I said, a little more forceful this time. I could sense the entire station watching her. Watching us. Silently, unamused, as I crept to the edge of the platform, lowering myself across the yellow line—one knee firmly on the chipped paint, the other braced at an angle behind me. “The train’s coming,” I repeated once more; I didn’t know how else to say it. “I’ll help you up.”
Two minutes.
I extended my arm towards her.
Calm, I told myself. Calm. Not panicky, not angry, not—
She paused. Completely still, arms splayed from her sides. Her eyes, beautiful endless pits, were oh so glassy, her lips so pale, her cheeks so sallow. Drugs, I thought, but I had been wrong before. Those same eyes, full of extinguished stars, snapped to mine above a wan, crooked mouth. She stared at me for a moment, taking in my flared nostrils, my sweaty palm. She looked at my hand, but she did not take it. She only stared.
It’s alright, I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know.
I felt the horde shift behind me. How did they all look at her, our fellow passengers? As some silly girl looking for a show? Did they see her as blue instead of green, a lost soul instead of a like one?
Blue isn’t always blue, I wanted to say. Green isn’t always green.
“The train is approaching the station.”
“She’ll pull you in,” the man with the bomber hat warned, but I couldn’t hear him. I was counting, my fingers spread, reaching—
“I’ll help you up,” I repeated. I didn’t dare turn my head, where I knew the train had started moving. Was rapidly approaching. Ready to take my hand. To take her.
Your place is here, I wanted to tell her. You belong here with us.
Slowly, her gaze went back to mine, as if my thoughts were a buzzing medium between us, and then—the twirling. She was twirling. Twirling even as the wind shifted, even as the white-hot steel cylinder came bounding towards us—
“For God’s sake!” a shrill voice hissed from behind me, and suddenly there was a firm grip locked on my shoulder. Then I was on the ground tasting gravel. My throat hollowed, but I couldn’t make a sound. The horror was so silent, I could hardly grasp it. To think that she was gone, to think that—
I rolled to my feet, ready to leap up and demand an explanation from that stupid little man in his stupid bomber hat, when the sound of the train came whooshing forward—to where the girl had climbed back up onto the platform, slumped against the wall beside the man with the doll’s foot in his pocket. As if she hadn’t moved it all. Not looking at me. Not looking at anyone. Just staring ahead blankly, bobbing her head back and forth to that wordless beat. As if she hadn’t just been inches from death.
“You’re welcome,” the man with the bomber hat huffed as he stormed past me onto the newly arrived train, vanishing into the maze of bodies already packed inside. The others followed—the texting couple, the girl with her red beret. No one said a word, nor exchanged a glance. It was unapologetic apathy at its finest. I followed them and did the same.
On the train, I stood close to the door, my knuckles blanched as I gripped the rubber safety handle. I tried to think of anything else—Jackson, my interview tomorrow, what I wanted for dinner . . . But I couldn’t stop seeing it—that pale image of my hand extended over the edge of the platform while the girl danced on. I tasted bile when I realized how close it had all been, how, seconds later . . . I did my best not to look at her, this dancer of her own tune, as she sank into the chair across the aisle from where I stood, her legs sprawled awkwardly out before her amid the clamor.
Just moments before, she had been ready to leave. She had been just seconds away from crossing into another life. And then she had decided to stay.
Thank you, I wanted to say to her. I felt the words rise to my throat. They were the words I tried to hear myself, again and again. But there were always more closed doors than open ones. I wondered how many she had knocked on before she found herself here.
“Doors closing,” the speakers blared, and I stared blankly ahead as they did just that. In an instant, we were moving. The expressway’s ominous blur deepened and evaporated as we dove into the tunnel, flying past the wisps of light, toward the towering city beyond. The train’s lull, which I had once found so comforting, tasted sour.
I braved a glance around the car. I found the man wearing purple lipstick. The long-faced marketing student. The man with the bomber hat, staring begrudging out the window. Each carried their own light—one they liked to pretend never wavered, was ever-burning and ever-bright. But they would be lying if they claimed it didn’t flicker from time to time. I would be, too. And so would she.
My eyes found her last.
Her unseeing eyes were trained on the floor, or somewhere beyond it. I felt the urge to question her—to ask her if she was okay, if she needed anything.
Because I didn’t know what color she was seeing. Not really. Sure, Jackson could have been right; we were all living the same life, in some way or another. But why, then, had the man in the bomber hat decided I was worth saving, while the girl below had danced inches from death? How had he seen us, so alike and so different? I wanted to text Jackson back, to scream at him and tell him blue is not always blue and left isn’t always left. We are all the same in death, but how we die is what sets us apart.
I did not look or speak to the girl on the train ride home, nor when my stop came only minutes later and I walked past her into the dinginess beyond. I would later see her in dreams, sitting on the edge of the platform, swinging her legs as a train came whistling past. Each time, I would awake in cold sweat, wondering if, wherever she was, she was still thinking of the tracks.
Alexis Berry is a writer hailing from Chicagoland. She is currently pursuing a major in Creative Writing and a minor in Professional Writing at Columbia College Chicago. She is also a Staff Writer for Unpublished Magazine. Her work has appeared in three of Columbia’s renowned literary journals, Hair Trigger, Punctuate. A Nonfiction Magazine, and Allium, A Journal of Poetry and Prose. When she isn’t writing, Alexis enjoys hiking, playing Super Smash Brothers, and reading.
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