I just wrote the weirdest story ever
What the hell happened? At the end I felt like something took over me and made this story so bizarre.
I wrote all of this for my fiction class tonight and it's due tomorrow, btw O_o
Nothing You Can Do About It
Betsy Gottesman
In the covered courtyard fifty girls stood and practiced their dance. In tightly ordered columns, like rows of cherry trees, like lines in a poem, they moved and jutted and clapped in unison to the warped, crackling beat of the song. Each girl wore the uniform of the next, each expression identical, though every so often the choreographer in her matching clothes would shout, "Smile!" and there would be a smattering of reaction from the cherry trees before they fluttered back into uniformity. Everyone danced the same dance, and one girl could just as easily be the girl to her right or to her left.
Yuko stood at the rear of the sea of dyed brown heads, looking for the faces of her friends, but they were impossible to find. It was nearly ten-thirty and Mika and Takako had said they would be finished by nine. She waited now, forgotten, incongruous, the unwanted visitor.
Someone had turned the volume too high on the tiny speakers that provided the music, the drum track they regurgitated contorted and fuzzy. The artist's thick voice erupted in a rough staccato of alien English syllables. The girls pounded feet and rolled shoulders in defiance of their incomprehension.
The choreographer shouted, "Turn!" and all the girls whirled away from her to begin their dance anew, the uniformed infantry obeying their commander. Yuko, now facing the throng of faces, found her friends somewhere among them, but they could not break from the structure of their routine to acknowledge her.
They were going to miss the train if they stayed at practice any later. She didn't have the three thousand for a cab. Fifty pairs of eyes trained on her, she forced a small, apologetic wave to her friends before she hurried from the courtyard and followed the red brick path out of campus.
In the cloying, humid night, her sweater clung, damp, to her shoulders. Her mood, too, was strangely damp, an odd gloom clinging humidly to her thoughts. Mika and Takako didn’t say goodbye. It wasn’t as if they really could have, in the middle of dance practice. Did it matter whether they had misjudged the time and left her to wait for nothing?
Mika had cut her hair short recently without telling Yuko about it. She shopped with Takako at stores popular with the girls in dance club. They decorated their phones with sticker pictures of each other and the other dance girls. Yuko’s phone was adorned with only pictures of the three of them.
Had it really been three years since they were riding the train together every morning, in matching skirts and blazers? In her mind, it was easy to picture them, seventeen again, in neat black pigtails and high navy socks, closer than sisters. To look at them now, you’d never guess. Now Mika and Takako dyed their hair and traveled to Shibuya together on weekends. Manicured fingernails had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, as plastic as their new personalities. Now, Yuko felt old-fashioned for wearing her hair naturally black and for lagging in their conversations, unaccustomed to their slang. Beside them, so adult and fashionable, she was stunted, uneven. Absently, she wished they were still forced to wear uniforms to school, as if the clothing itself was what was separating her further and further from her childhood friends.
To the growing distance between the girls, her mother would say, “shikata nai”- there’s nothing you can do about it. To her mother, it was a magical phrase that carried a certain kind of pragmatic comfort, an absolution of guilt and the bleak acceptance of fate. To Yuko, they hung hollowly in her conscience, rattling like dry bones in her mind.
The July night drew close around her, still and hot. The distant jeer of cicadas echoed past rows of houses that guided her path to the station. Three gawky, round-faced high school students shuttled past her on bicycles. The few sparse trees, planted optimistically along the street, appeared sunken, like old women, as if they too were stricken by the wet summer heat.
Her thoughts clung to her and pressed her to hurry toward the station. Everything pushed her. Time pushed her through her life, pushed her ever further away from her past and her friends and hurtled her into the unknown future. Time was the greatest obstacle and the greatest thing she couldn’t control, yet it controlled her utterly. She thought bleakly of the high school uniform still hanging in her closet at home like a banner of the victory of time over her happiness.
In another year, she would begin job interviews, her female classmates filing into suits and skirts, tomorrow’s receptionists and stewardesses. You were expected to choose- receptionist, stewardess, nurse, teacher. What could possibly dictate her choice? Why couldn’t she have chosen the time to choose, instead of having it foisted on her? She had no choice, of course, but to plot her life with directions she didn’t understand. No one had told her what to aspire to be. No one had led her. And yet she stumbled down the path, bowed and looming like the sickly trees, and the only directions she had were what she couldn’t do. And there was nothing she could do about it.
She turned at the end of a row of houses, onto a street flooded with fluorescent glow. Here, high-fenced homes gave way to clustered bars and noodle shops, mostly empty, still hoping to attract any remaining commuters. Yuko ignored them and they ignored her, their signs bright but vacant, unwelcoming. The narrow street tilted inwards at her and she felt compelled to press forward, pulling absently at her sticking sweater.
Ahead was the station, where the road dead-ended, screeching to an unceremonial stop at the chain link fence. A few errant parking spaces were scattered like afterthoughts beside the staircase entrance. A small, worn sign hung limply from the fence, proclaiming, “Taxi Stop”, though the space stood defiantly bereft of any cars. Beyond the fence were the train tracks themselves, then the raised concrete platform and its yellow sign that declared the station’s name as Makuhari. A few late night travelers peppered the platform. An old man slumped in the blue courtesy chairs, hands loosely fixed around a wooden cane, apparently asleep. Several more people stood on the far platform, and as Yuko approached, she watched as the last Tokyo-bound train of the night arrived, the automatic doors swinging wide to usher them in. Then, they were gone, the platform left empty.
Yuko gave the stairs of the station entrance a customary look. There were thirty-odd of them- she’d counted once out of boredom. Her low heels clicked on the first few steps, and she tried to subdue the noise the rest of the way up, though for whose benefit she didn’t know. The heat made the thirty steps decisively difficult. She briefly wondered how the old man with the cane had even managed it.
The inside of the station gleamed with greenish fluorescent light. The unadorned Italian restaurant was dark at this time of night, but the ubiquitous convenience store was still open. Yuko passed it and clicked across the shining white floor to the ticket machines. Facing the wall, where the automatic ticket vendors resided beneath the giant map of the subway system, she rummaged through her purse and produced a limp bill to feed to the machine. A tinny female voice rang out in the deserted station, suggesting a little too loudly that she enter a destination. She pressed the screen for her desired stop, and then again quickly, before the artificial voice could ask her and the entire neighborhood if she wanted a receipt. Plucking her tiny slip of a ticket, she crossed the floor to the station gates. A lone attendant perched incidentally behind a glass screen, paying no attention to Yuko as she fed her ticket into the slot and passed through the small automatic doors.
It was ten to eleven by the station’s clock. Ten minutes until the train arrived. Mika and Takako were probably still in the midst of endlessly practicing the same dance. Yuko descended the escalator to the Chiba-bound platform.
Time and the trains were similar, she decided. At least you had a reason to obey the train schedule, and at least the trains had the decency to tell you were you were headed. There was no alternative, however expensive, to being dragged along by time to your unknown, unannounced destination. You weren’t given the option of riding or not. Yuko clutched her ticket in her hand, as if to demonstrate which system she preferred.
The platform greeted her, nearly empty as she had seen from the street. The old man with the cane now listed slightly to the side, in brown shoes and slacks. Directly at the mouth of the escalator stood a woman on the further side of middle age, her hair buoyant in the humidity, her wide face drawn and lined. Her mouth sunk beneath her flat nose like a creased piece of paper. She gazed in wait at the tracks in front of her, tired, heavy.
Yuko moved down the platform, beyond the middle-aged woman and the sleeping man, and took her space beside one of the vending machines haphazardly installed along the platform. Small markers indicated where the train’s doors would align with them, and she positioned herself between two of the little green triangles. Overhead, an electric sign displayed the destination and time of the final train in scrolling red letters.
At the end of the platform, near the smoking section, stood a young woman in green flats and a white skirt to her knees. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties, tall and slender, her shoulders poised beneath a pink knit blouse. Long, straight black hair flowed out behind her and down her back, elegant black bangs curled to frame her face. Heedless of the muggy summer night and the hot, dead air, she wore a silk scarf maturely tied around her neck, pearlescent green like her shoes. One hand held securely onto the strap of her white purse. In the other, she curled long fingers around a cell phone, her thumb working buttons. She stood with feet together, assured and erect behind the yellow safety line, one knee slightly bent. She had a pretty face, powdered and haloed in delicate makeup in pinks and peaches, her large, dark eyes focused on the cell phone screen in her hand.
Yuko, too, wore a skirt and a blouse, her hair black and straight along her back. She too, wore her makeup light and soft. But she didn’t stand the way the woman stood. Yuko’s shoulders sagged, her back thrown forward, as if the weight of her melancholy carried its own physical gravity. Her sweater was sticky and damp against her skin, while the woman looked untouched, as if she had been transported to the platform straight from an air conditioned room. The hand that was not clutching her ticket traveled unconsciously upward to curl around the handle of her purse.
Five years, she thought, maybe less, and she would be this woman’s age. Five years ago, the woman had been a girl her age. Had she stood so straight then? Or had the fear of the unknown, of the things she couldn’t control, weighed her down as well? What gave her the right, the confidence to stand without fear now? What tenuous hold on time and her future had she found and grasped so strongly? Yuko was weak and unsteady in the face of time. Her friends, too, danced to foreign music and dyed their hair in frightened defiance of the inevitable day when they would step out of their youth and inexorably into their adulthood. But this woman standing, raised like a flag, had found something to truly give her confidence. Nowhere in her posture, in her expression, was the evidence of someone tethered to time, not even in the empty comfort of “there is nothing you can do about it.” That was the business of the middle-aged woman with the drawn, closed face and the hair surrendered to the elements.
That woman was her mother, she realized- directed by uncertainty, blown about like fallen cherry blossoms, taking solace in the idea that everyone was equally beset by the whims of time and fortune. What a pity to realize how wrong she was. For here stood a woman in defiance to it all. She was left untouched by the heat and humidity of the night because she utterly refused it. The whims of time and fortune bent around her, inconsequential and irrelevant. She was in utter control of her destiny.
What was the secret? What had she found to build into her backbone and let her defy this world that simultaneously directed and denied its women? Yuko felt suddenly as if she were poised on the edge of a precipice, a chasm across time- this woman was her. This was her future self, come to instruct her and lead her into certainty. In the bend of her knee, the movement of her fingers across the buttons, the calmness in her eyes, she held the answer to Yuko’s future and unequivocally revealed there is nothing you can do about it for the lie that it was- there was something, and she- Yuko- had found it.
Yuko heard the announcement for the coming train from far away, but it was hollow to her ears- she was in a place beyond time’s reach with the woman at the end of the platform. The middle aged lady and the old man, both held hostage by their fate, stirred to life at the announcement, but Yuko floated above it, now confident that no matter which train she took, it would lead her where she wanted to go, simply by virtue of her willing it so. The woman clicked her cell phone shut with satisfying finality, holding it confidently at her side. She stared straight ahead, serenely calm, her eyes bright and focused. Yuko found her back straightened, her head lifted, her body unconsciously aligned with the woman. The dim approaching lights of the train haloed her jet black hair and grew in Yuko’s vision, as if demanding her attention, proclaiming that the arrival of the train was inevitable, that all things move forward and all things will come to pass regardless of what you do. Yuko felt the woman’s confidence in herself, in her small of her back and the set of her spine. She turned fully toward the woman now, toward the light in the distance, measured it, and dismissed it. The approaching train roared as if enraged by her defiance, but she let the sound pass through her, warped and infantilized, like the fuzzy beat of the foreign song. In a few moments, it would arrive, howling and furious, but she knew it was beaten- it, too, would stop, would follow her direction and take her only where she let it.
In the span of a heartbeat, the yellow glow of the train’s lights behind her and engulfing her, the woman turned to Yuko, and they stared at each other across the span of time, the woman she was and would be, and the gleam in the woman’s eyes told her that she would reveal to her how she had found her control over fate.
In a final, pathetic capitulation, time stopped around them. The woman turned back toward the tracks, her feet aligned, her green flats to the floor. Then, with the grace of a goddess, the elegance of a flowering branch, she stepped forward on the platform, once, twice, over the yellow safety line. Her shoes clicked neatly together once more, and then she leapt, frozen in midair for that eternal moment, the noise of the train a pulsing singularity around them, and the air hot and sticky like a human heart, like the very secrets of a woman’s soul. Her hair shimmered in the light behind her. Her pink mouth held the glimpse of a smile.
With a rush of air around her and through her, time started anew. The train blared its horn, but it was an eternity too late. The train struck the woman- the woman struck the train- and was gone from her, the woman pulled under and along the track and there was a sound like a scream but it came from the middle-aged woman, who fell to the ground and clutched at her heart. The train’s wheels squealed and it raced and raced by her until it finally ground to a stop, the passengers who had happened to see the woman jump already leaping out and yelling for an ambulance. The middle-aged woman lay like a fallen tree against the floor, and the old man had hobbled to her side.
Yuko’s subway ticket fluttered, forgotten, from her open hand and settled to the floor. She took measured, even steps, one at a time, in front of her. Eyes forward, shoulders back. She was gone from herself. The train had gone immediately dark, the electricity cut. They would be looking for the woman’s body and they would have to clean up the blood and they would shut down the train to do it. It would be quite a while before it moved again, now that it had been utterly, irreparably changed.
Yuko entered the dead mouth of the car and silently took a seat. And waited.
I wrote all of this for my fiction class tonight and it's due tomorrow, btw O_o
Nothing You Can Do About It
Betsy Gottesman
In the covered courtyard fifty girls stood and practiced their dance. In tightly ordered columns, like rows of cherry trees, like lines in a poem, they moved and jutted and clapped in unison to the warped, crackling beat of the song. Each girl wore the uniform of the next, each expression identical, though every so often the choreographer in her matching clothes would shout, "Smile!" and there would be a smattering of reaction from the cherry trees before they fluttered back into uniformity. Everyone danced the same dance, and one girl could just as easily be the girl to her right or to her left.
Yuko stood at the rear of the sea of dyed brown heads, looking for the faces of her friends, but they were impossible to find. It was nearly ten-thirty and Mika and Takako had said they would be finished by nine. She waited now, forgotten, incongruous, the unwanted visitor.
Someone had turned the volume too high on the tiny speakers that provided the music, the drum track they regurgitated contorted and fuzzy. The artist's thick voice erupted in a rough staccato of alien English syllables. The girls pounded feet and rolled shoulders in defiance of their incomprehension.
The choreographer shouted, "Turn!" and all the girls whirled away from her to begin their dance anew, the uniformed infantry obeying their commander. Yuko, now facing the throng of faces, found her friends somewhere among them, but they could not break from the structure of their routine to acknowledge her.
They were going to miss the train if they stayed at practice any later. She didn't have the three thousand for a cab. Fifty pairs of eyes trained on her, she forced a small, apologetic wave to her friends before she hurried from the courtyard and followed the red brick path out of campus.
In the cloying, humid night, her sweater clung, damp, to her shoulders. Her mood, too, was strangely damp, an odd gloom clinging humidly to her thoughts. Mika and Takako didn’t say goodbye. It wasn’t as if they really could have, in the middle of dance practice. Did it matter whether they had misjudged the time and left her to wait for nothing?
Mika had cut her hair short recently without telling Yuko about it. She shopped with Takako at stores popular with the girls in dance club. They decorated their phones with sticker pictures of each other and the other dance girls. Yuko’s phone was adorned with only pictures of the three of them.
Had it really been three years since they were riding the train together every morning, in matching skirts and blazers? In her mind, it was easy to picture them, seventeen again, in neat black pigtails and high navy socks, closer than sisters. To look at them now, you’d never guess. Now Mika and Takako dyed their hair and traveled to Shibuya together on weekends. Manicured fingernails had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, as plastic as their new personalities. Now, Yuko felt old-fashioned for wearing her hair naturally black and for lagging in their conversations, unaccustomed to their slang. Beside them, so adult and fashionable, she was stunted, uneven. Absently, she wished they were still forced to wear uniforms to school, as if the clothing itself was what was separating her further and further from her childhood friends.
To the growing distance between the girls, her mother would say, “shikata nai”- there’s nothing you can do about it. To her mother, it was a magical phrase that carried a certain kind of pragmatic comfort, an absolution of guilt and the bleak acceptance of fate. To Yuko, they hung hollowly in her conscience, rattling like dry bones in her mind.
The July night drew close around her, still and hot. The distant jeer of cicadas echoed past rows of houses that guided her path to the station. Three gawky, round-faced high school students shuttled past her on bicycles. The few sparse trees, planted optimistically along the street, appeared sunken, like old women, as if they too were stricken by the wet summer heat.
Her thoughts clung to her and pressed her to hurry toward the station. Everything pushed her. Time pushed her through her life, pushed her ever further away from her past and her friends and hurtled her into the unknown future. Time was the greatest obstacle and the greatest thing she couldn’t control, yet it controlled her utterly. She thought bleakly of the high school uniform still hanging in her closet at home like a banner of the victory of time over her happiness.
In another year, she would begin job interviews, her female classmates filing into suits and skirts, tomorrow’s receptionists and stewardesses. You were expected to choose- receptionist, stewardess, nurse, teacher. What could possibly dictate her choice? Why couldn’t she have chosen the time to choose, instead of having it foisted on her? She had no choice, of course, but to plot her life with directions she didn’t understand. No one had told her what to aspire to be. No one had led her. And yet she stumbled down the path, bowed and looming like the sickly trees, and the only directions she had were what she couldn’t do. And there was nothing she could do about it.
She turned at the end of a row of houses, onto a street flooded with fluorescent glow. Here, high-fenced homes gave way to clustered bars and noodle shops, mostly empty, still hoping to attract any remaining commuters. Yuko ignored them and they ignored her, their signs bright but vacant, unwelcoming. The narrow street tilted inwards at her and she felt compelled to press forward, pulling absently at her sticking sweater.
Ahead was the station, where the road dead-ended, screeching to an unceremonial stop at the chain link fence. A few errant parking spaces were scattered like afterthoughts beside the staircase entrance. A small, worn sign hung limply from the fence, proclaiming, “Taxi Stop”, though the space stood defiantly bereft of any cars. Beyond the fence were the train tracks themselves, then the raised concrete platform and its yellow sign that declared the station’s name as Makuhari. A few late night travelers peppered the platform. An old man slumped in the blue courtesy chairs, hands loosely fixed around a wooden cane, apparently asleep. Several more people stood on the far platform, and as Yuko approached, she watched as the last Tokyo-bound train of the night arrived, the automatic doors swinging wide to usher them in. Then, they were gone, the platform left empty.
Yuko gave the stairs of the station entrance a customary look. There were thirty-odd of them- she’d counted once out of boredom. Her low heels clicked on the first few steps, and she tried to subdue the noise the rest of the way up, though for whose benefit she didn’t know. The heat made the thirty steps decisively difficult. She briefly wondered how the old man with the cane had even managed it.
The inside of the station gleamed with greenish fluorescent light. The unadorned Italian restaurant was dark at this time of night, but the ubiquitous convenience store was still open. Yuko passed it and clicked across the shining white floor to the ticket machines. Facing the wall, where the automatic ticket vendors resided beneath the giant map of the subway system, she rummaged through her purse and produced a limp bill to feed to the machine. A tinny female voice rang out in the deserted station, suggesting a little too loudly that she enter a destination. She pressed the screen for her desired stop, and then again quickly, before the artificial voice could ask her and the entire neighborhood if she wanted a receipt. Plucking her tiny slip of a ticket, she crossed the floor to the station gates. A lone attendant perched incidentally behind a glass screen, paying no attention to Yuko as she fed her ticket into the slot and passed through the small automatic doors.
It was ten to eleven by the station’s clock. Ten minutes until the train arrived. Mika and Takako were probably still in the midst of endlessly practicing the same dance. Yuko descended the escalator to the Chiba-bound platform.
Time and the trains were similar, she decided. At least you had a reason to obey the train schedule, and at least the trains had the decency to tell you were you were headed. There was no alternative, however expensive, to being dragged along by time to your unknown, unannounced destination. You weren’t given the option of riding or not. Yuko clutched her ticket in her hand, as if to demonstrate which system she preferred.
The platform greeted her, nearly empty as she had seen from the street. The old man with the cane now listed slightly to the side, in brown shoes and slacks. Directly at the mouth of the escalator stood a woman on the further side of middle age, her hair buoyant in the humidity, her wide face drawn and lined. Her mouth sunk beneath her flat nose like a creased piece of paper. She gazed in wait at the tracks in front of her, tired, heavy.
Yuko moved down the platform, beyond the middle-aged woman and the sleeping man, and took her space beside one of the vending machines haphazardly installed along the platform. Small markers indicated where the train’s doors would align with them, and she positioned herself between two of the little green triangles. Overhead, an electric sign displayed the destination and time of the final train in scrolling red letters.
At the end of the platform, near the smoking section, stood a young woman in green flats and a white skirt to her knees. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties, tall and slender, her shoulders poised beneath a pink knit blouse. Long, straight black hair flowed out behind her and down her back, elegant black bangs curled to frame her face. Heedless of the muggy summer night and the hot, dead air, she wore a silk scarf maturely tied around her neck, pearlescent green like her shoes. One hand held securely onto the strap of her white purse. In the other, she curled long fingers around a cell phone, her thumb working buttons. She stood with feet together, assured and erect behind the yellow safety line, one knee slightly bent. She had a pretty face, powdered and haloed in delicate makeup in pinks and peaches, her large, dark eyes focused on the cell phone screen in her hand.
Yuko, too, wore a skirt and a blouse, her hair black and straight along her back. She too, wore her makeup light and soft. But she didn’t stand the way the woman stood. Yuko’s shoulders sagged, her back thrown forward, as if the weight of her melancholy carried its own physical gravity. Her sweater was sticky and damp against her skin, while the woman looked untouched, as if she had been transported to the platform straight from an air conditioned room. The hand that was not clutching her ticket traveled unconsciously upward to curl around the handle of her purse.
Five years, she thought, maybe less, and she would be this woman’s age. Five years ago, the woman had been a girl her age. Had she stood so straight then? Or had the fear of the unknown, of the things she couldn’t control, weighed her down as well? What gave her the right, the confidence to stand without fear now? What tenuous hold on time and her future had she found and grasped so strongly? Yuko was weak and unsteady in the face of time. Her friends, too, danced to foreign music and dyed their hair in frightened defiance of the inevitable day when they would step out of their youth and inexorably into their adulthood. But this woman standing, raised like a flag, had found something to truly give her confidence. Nowhere in her posture, in her expression, was the evidence of someone tethered to time, not even in the empty comfort of “there is nothing you can do about it.” That was the business of the middle-aged woman with the drawn, closed face and the hair surrendered to the elements.
That woman was her mother, she realized- directed by uncertainty, blown about like fallen cherry blossoms, taking solace in the idea that everyone was equally beset by the whims of time and fortune. What a pity to realize how wrong she was. For here stood a woman in defiance to it all. She was left untouched by the heat and humidity of the night because she utterly refused it. The whims of time and fortune bent around her, inconsequential and irrelevant. She was in utter control of her destiny.
What was the secret? What had she found to build into her backbone and let her defy this world that simultaneously directed and denied its women? Yuko felt suddenly as if she were poised on the edge of a precipice, a chasm across time- this woman was her. This was her future self, come to instruct her and lead her into certainty. In the bend of her knee, the movement of her fingers across the buttons, the calmness in her eyes, she held the answer to Yuko’s future and unequivocally revealed there is nothing you can do about it for the lie that it was- there was something, and she- Yuko- had found it.
Yuko heard the announcement for the coming train from far away, but it was hollow to her ears- she was in a place beyond time’s reach with the woman at the end of the platform. The middle aged lady and the old man, both held hostage by their fate, stirred to life at the announcement, but Yuko floated above it, now confident that no matter which train she took, it would lead her where she wanted to go, simply by virtue of her willing it so. The woman clicked her cell phone shut with satisfying finality, holding it confidently at her side. She stared straight ahead, serenely calm, her eyes bright and focused. Yuko found her back straightened, her head lifted, her body unconsciously aligned with the woman. The dim approaching lights of the train haloed her jet black hair and grew in Yuko’s vision, as if demanding her attention, proclaiming that the arrival of the train was inevitable, that all things move forward and all things will come to pass regardless of what you do. Yuko felt the woman’s confidence in herself, in her small of her back and the set of her spine. She turned fully toward the woman now, toward the light in the distance, measured it, and dismissed it. The approaching train roared as if enraged by her defiance, but she let the sound pass through her, warped and infantilized, like the fuzzy beat of the foreign song. In a few moments, it would arrive, howling and furious, but she knew it was beaten- it, too, would stop, would follow her direction and take her only where she let it.
In the span of a heartbeat, the yellow glow of the train’s lights behind her and engulfing her, the woman turned to Yuko, and they stared at each other across the span of time, the woman she was and would be, and the gleam in the woman’s eyes told her that she would reveal to her how she had found her control over fate.
In a final, pathetic capitulation, time stopped around them. The woman turned back toward the tracks, her feet aligned, her green flats to the floor. Then, with the grace of a goddess, the elegance of a flowering branch, she stepped forward on the platform, once, twice, over the yellow safety line. Her shoes clicked neatly together once more, and then she leapt, frozen in midair for that eternal moment, the noise of the train a pulsing singularity around them, and the air hot and sticky like a human heart, like the very secrets of a woman’s soul. Her hair shimmered in the light behind her. Her pink mouth held the glimpse of a smile.
With a rush of air around her and through her, time started anew. The train blared its horn, but it was an eternity too late. The train struck the woman- the woman struck the train- and was gone from her, the woman pulled under and along the track and there was a sound like a scream but it came from the middle-aged woman, who fell to the ground and clutched at her heart. The train’s wheels squealed and it raced and raced by her until it finally ground to a stop, the passengers who had happened to see the woman jump already leaping out and yelling for an ambulance. The middle-aged woman lay like a fallen tree against the floor, and the old man had hobbled to her side.
Yuko’s subway ticket fluttered, forgotten, from her open hand and settled to the floor. She took measured, even steps, one at a time, in front of her. Eyes forward, shoulders back. She was gone from herself. The train had gone immediately dark, the electricity cut. They would be looking for the woman’s body and they would have to clean up the blood and they would shut down the train to do it. It would be quite a while before it moved again, now that it had been utterly, irreparably changed.
Yuko entered the dead mouth of the car and silently took a seat. And waited.