Her brown eyes watered. She dried them on her lab coat’s sleeve, blaming the formaldehyde lingering in the laboratory’s filtered air. When fresh tears stung her eyes hours later at the subway station, Raya convinced herself that it must be on account of the preservative clinging to her clothes. She wiped them away with the back of her hand before squeezing through the subway car’s doors.
Raya made her way through the crowd, her eyes flitting over their faces. She found a seat and began a timer in her head, counting downthe seconds the passengers would share the train with her. Soon, each one of them was going to disappear, just as they did every evening.
Q
Q kicked himself for forgetting to top up his metro card. The musky perfume of the man in line in front of him at the top-up machine lanced his nose. Losing his sight had heightened his other senses, but this was one of those instances that he wished it had not.
He held his breath until the man left, adjusting the brown-paper-wrapped painting tucked under his arm. It would have been easier to deliver the piece to the gallery by cab, but he was stubborn that way. Only tourists used taxis. He stepped in front of the machine and squinted through his thick glasses, trying to make out the words on the screen one letter at a time. Cold sweat beaded on his nape. The woman in line behind him came to his rescue. Q thanked her, unable to tell from what he could see of her lips if she was wearing a smile or a frown.
Q made his way to the platform, tracing the guiding strip along the tiled floor with his walking stick. A blue blur darted in front of him and tripped over the stick, breaking it in two. Q tumbled to the floor, taking his painting with him. The blur mumbled an apology and ran off. A man helped Q to his feet and handed his painting back along with the pieces of his cane.
“Thank you.” Q ran his hand over the painting. Its wrapper was torn, but the canvas was intact.
“Are you hurt?” The rasp in the man’s voice gave Q the impression that the man either was twice his age or smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. The hint of cloves on his breath made Q inclined to believe that it was the latter and that his cigarette of choice was the same brand of Indonesian cigarettes his father used to hoard.
“I’m fine.” Q put on a smile that he would have ripped off his own face if he had known how much it mimicked his father’s. “Thanks.”
A tinny voice crackled over the loudspeaker and announced that Q’s train was going to be delayed. Q checked his watch, forgetting that he no longer wore one. He clenched his fists around his broken walking stick and squeezed his eyes shut even though he didn’t have to. He already lived in the dark. Tears watered his throat. He imagined that tonight, after people bid on the last pieces of his dream, he would spend his final evening in his empty apartment staring up at a ceiling he could no longer see.
He was never going to know if the blue blur had meant his apology or if the stranger who had just helped him had smiled before he walked away. He was never going to be able to look anyone in the eye and see their true intentions. The world would blindside him just as his father had and all he could do was brace himself and wait to be knocked down.
Wind howled through the tunnel and blew across the platform. The gray storm raging behind Q’s eyelids wailed over it. He pulled his shoulders back and took a step forward, with neither a walking stick nor the will to keep himself from falling. He gripped his unfinished painting and hurled it onto the tracks and into the waiting dark.
“What time does the Elsewhere Express depart?”
Frequently Asked Questions
The Elsewhere Express
Passenger Handbook
Raya
Meandering thoughts carried their owners farther than any subway line could. The woman seated next to Raya was in the process of boarding a daydream without having to buy a ticket or swipe a card.
A small smile played over the woman’s glossy, overlined lips as she stroked the orange cat purring on her lap with her glittery acrylic extensions. Each of her fingernails contained a galaxy, and every star in them, a wish. Her fondest one was to put up an animal shelter. No, a sanctuary. On a sprawling piece of land where animals could roam free. Cats. Dogs. Bunnies. Horses. She scratched behind her cat’s ears, strolling through a moonlit meadow only she could see. She strode past a clear pond where unwanted goldfish didn’t turn gray or grow monstrously big. She paused mid-step. Fish, she thought, would be nice for dinner. She had a couple of sole fillets in her freezer that she could bake with a creamy sauce of butter, garlic, and lemon. Oh, and mustard. It was her secret ingredient. And the name of her orange cat. Mustard rubbed its head against her palm and purred.
Across from Mustard, a man with a neatly trimmed beard contemplated the mud splattered on his right pant leg, not because itwas particularly interesting, but because the largest of the stains resembled a black hole. He and Lily had watched a movie about black holes on their third date. The movie was terrible. The date was not. It ended in her bed, their clothes in a tangle around their ankles. Six months later, Lily would tattoo his name in cursive on the inside of her right wrist. Though the bright scarlet letters were as fine as silk thread, they clanked inside his skull like iron chains whenever Lily held his hand. It was at that precise moment, he realized, that he and Lily had started to rust. He wondered if Lily was married now and if she had any kids, and what would have happened if he had not left her for a job that took him as far away from the chain on her arm as possible. He thought about the little mole on her collarbone, her perfectly shaped toes, and all the wonderful things she could do with her tongue.Lily. Lily. Lily.If he closed his eyes, he could smell the coconut shampoo in her untamable red hair.
Standing in front of the man daydreaming of an ex-lover named Lily, a young man with more piercings along his shaved brow than Raya had on her entire body slipped on a pair of black headphones. Haydn’s String Quartet in E-flat Major, opus 20, number 1, swept away the noise of the day, making room for all the formulas he would need for his two-hour-long actuarial math exam the next morning. An oak tree’s thick canopy rustled above him, heavy with bright, glowing numbers where there should have been leaves. He stretched across the grass and ran his palms over a patch of wildflowers, stirring a scent reminiscent of roses and mint.
Raya did not have to hear the music flowing through the man’s headphones to know that it had carried him to a place far beyond the subway line’s last stop. His gaze was like everyone else’s around her: glazed over and distant, regardless of whether they stared into space or at their phones. Unlike her fellow passengers, Raya kept her thoughts on a much shorter leash, never allowing them to go farther than two seats away. They made do with strolls through a stranger’s brown coat buttons, another person’s hearing aid, and the downward turn of the mouth on a girl who looked much too young to be wearing a permanent frown.
But today their leash was even shorter. Raya kept a closer eye onher thoughts at this time of year—they were always extra fidgety around Jace’s death anniversary. She ordered them to sit down while she switched on her earphones’ noise-canceling mode.
Soft static flooded her ears. Raya couldn’t bear to listen to music, not since she had stopped writing it. Songs were terrible houseguests. They never took off their shoes, they poked around drawers without permission, and they always left a mess. White noise had far better manners and had the good sense to stay out of locked cabinets and rooms. Raya closed her eyes. A fresh floral fragrance drifted past her nose. Someone close by, she thought, had the most incredible rose-and-mint perfume. It slipped inside her, painting a moonlit scene behind her eyelids.
Wildflowers.
Grass.
An oak tree heavy with branches of glowing math formulas instead of leaves.
Raya usually banished daydreams before they whisked her away, but tonight, she made an exception. Her station was close and a reverie about a strange number tree could not possibly take her very far. A symphony of birdsongs and violins broke through the earphones’ static. Raya’s eyes flew open.
She was no longer in the subway car. An empty vintage train had taken its place.
“Who is in charge of the train?”
