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September 21, 2008
Incidental Anecdote
I got on the L this evening, coming to or from getting a cup of coffee, and found a place to stand amidst the thin crowd and opened my book. Other passengers trickled in, and amongst them was a woman who, in her rush to make it aboard before the doors whisked shut, tripped and fell, her foot sliding through the partition between the platform and the train. She tried to right herself, to extricate her foot, but could not. Her entire body seemed to contract, and the air around her thinned and turned sharp as she exclaimed in a calm, strained voice that she was stuck. Those nearest the door joined her friends in helping her tug her ankle from betwixt its moorings. After a moment she was free and aboard the train, and those doors innocuously slid shut and the platform slipped off into darkness as the train departed. The space between passengers returned. Her friends were laughing in relief, and she was too, but her eyes were still wild, desperate, swimming with something more base than fear. Her body was reacting to the conclusion to which she had immediately jumped; the same one her friends had leaped to, and to which you the reader surely made as well, placing you, for just a moment there between sentences, at the fore of that train car with a dozen other strangers who all, for that same moment, were thinking the very same thing: that this could have been one of those stories.
Posted by David Lowery at September 21, 2008 12:27 AM