10/15/18

When I opened my eyes, I was on a train sitting next to the black, curly-haired boy.  I looked up to the sign and it said that we heading towards 95th.  His eyes had a red glow to them, and he was wearing a Patagonia fleece.  There were only a few other people on the train besides us; two were sitting, one was standing by the door.  The seats across from us were empty.  The one directly across from me was covered in a grass-green smear, on both parts of the seats.  It was so stained it was out of place.  I had seen a lot of gross stuff on the train before, but nothing like that.  Also, on the part of the aisle north of us, the whole aisle was smeared in what it looked like was mud.  I had just noticed it after I opened my eyes- I looked under my shoes to see if I had gotten any of it on me, but I hadn’t.

“I just wanted to show you,” he said, opening his backpack and taking out a book, “This is my favorite book.  We are required to disclose something personal before I let you see it.”

He handed me a copy of A Wrinkle in Time. 

“Let me see what?”  I asked, taking the book from him.  I had read it before but I had never seen this version of it before.  On the cover was a picture of the three children riding a half-man half-horse, and they were flying in the sky through a rainbow.  “Why is this your favorite book?  It’s a kid’s book.” 

“To be honest,” he said, “it is kind of what we are working towards.  Not the whole It part, but the other stuff.  Whenever I have a bad day, sometimes, I read it and feel better, knowing that it has at least been fathomed that an It was defeated.”

The door chimed and a girl with curly black hair walked through it.  Her hands were fixing her coat and she was looking down, zippering her zipper.  She was headed right for the smeared mud, but she was looking down so I assumed that she would catch sight of it before she stepped in it.  But she didn’t.  She walked right through it, leaving boot prints all over the floor.

“Let you see that,” he said, rudely pointing a finger to the woman and the floor.  In a matter of seconds, she sat in the seat across from us, even though it seemed that she had caught sight of the green stain before she sat down.  I saw her eyes level right up to the green stain, but she just sat down on the dirty seat, took her cell phone out of her pocket, and dialed a number.

“Hello?”  She asked, propping her feet under the seat and cocking her head to the side.

The black-haired guy looked up to me.  The black of his eyes turned gold for a minute, catching me off guard. 

“She didn’t see it,” he said un-a-matter-of-factly.  “They never see it.  It is because, in a parallel wall, at the very place we were when she boarded the train, there stood a forest, as opposed to all of this- urbanity.”

The girl across from us proceeded to schedule a doctor appointment.

“It can be a problem, sometimes,” he said, “sharing space.  Not even sharing space, just…time.”

I felt like I was alone with the reality that what had happened, had, in fact, just happened.  It felt magic yet dangerous at the same time.  The girl got up at the sound of the bell and walked out of the train.  And still, behind her was the green grass stain, and a second set of footprints in the dark mud that coated the train floor. 

When I closed my eyes to blink, I was in darkness.