Dorothy Brown ’23
Untitled A man stood on a subway platform. He wore a dark blue windbreaker over a light gray shirt and had a black backpack on his shoulders. He was staring at his phone, waiting for the train. The platform was, as it had always been, dingy, filthy, and crowded. The red and white tiles were smudged with the dust and grime of a thousand commuters who had shuffled through the station that day. Though the area was well lit, the white light seemed just as dirty as the places it illuminated. The piles of litter that had accumulated on the track blew about as a train grinded to a stop, the brakes fighting the inertia of its hundreds of silent, indifferent passengers. The man’s eyes wandered up to the arriving train, and then back to his screen as he stood at the side of an opening door. His face was fixed in a blank, slightly tense look to match the crowd around him. Not that he took much notice of them as he boarded the train, or as it slowly struggled into motion again. A door down, a woman walked onto the train. She was a strange sight on the subway, every bit as filthy and unkempt as the station, though perhaps a little wilder. Her pale, limp hair hung unbrushed and untied about the sides of her wax-white face, and her clothes were loose, unwashed, and colorless. She looked over the heads of the people and stared up and down the train with intense eyes that swept across the crowd for only a moment, until they rested on the man at the end of the car. She walked towards the man, and the passengers moved out of her way without objection, never looking at her, never acknowledging her existence except to shift and let her pass by. She seemed to stumble, lurching through the train with uneven, yet not unbalanced, motions. When she reached the man, she simply stood, her eyes fixed on him, as if reading a story. For a long time, she stood there, until slowly, slowly, she lifted her thin, grubby hand from her side and moved it towards the man. The fingers reached hungrily out, until they rested on the phone, her hand covering the light for just a moment. Her harsh eyes closed, and her chest rose as if she were breathing in some wonderful scent. The man did not react to her presence or the hand she had reached out. He did not move his eyes from his phone until she had let her hand fall back to her side, 10
