Ever since she left her husband, Kit has been riding the train. She gets on at the station down the street from the one-bedroom she can’t really afford, in the direction of New York City. The train is already quite full when she boards with only a few scattered seats. She doesn’t mind this, because she can allow a knee to graze against the jeans of the woman next to her reading a short story collection who looks from the corner of her eye like her college girlfriend. Kit wonders if this girlfriend, who broke up with her after six months because Kit was too “intense,” is the only person she’s ever loved. This woman smells like lilac and Kit wants to tug the book gently to the left so she can read it too, the two of them hearing the same words inside their heads. In her one-bedroom, her thoughts are waterfall-loud. It’s only on the train, as it rocks and judders forward, surrounding her with the conversations and rustlings of other people, that things go quiet. She dreads the moment that the windows go dark because it means they’ve dived beneath the streets of Manhattan and soon the train will huff to a halt and the woman next to her will get up without a word and go somewhere and meet someone or someones. Kit has no one to meet. Kit will scoot in towards the window and wait for the motion to begin again, wait for someone to settle in beside her. She and this person will see the same view, breathe the same overcooled plastic air, be pulled and jerked by the same poorly maintained tracks, a shared choreography she wants to run on endless loop.
~
Wendy Elizabeth Wallace (she/they) is a queer disabled writer. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and has landed in Connecticut by way of Pennsylvania, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Indiana. They are the editor-in-chief of Peatsmoke Journal and the co-manager of social media and marketing for Splitw Lip Magazine. Their work has appeared in The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, Pithead Chapel, SmokeLong Quarterly, Brevity, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @WendyEWallace1or at www.wendywallacewriter.com