Free your ride: #4
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This is your prompt:
Now, write:
Late for the train again, too much time looking for cigarettes.
“Quit smoking,” she wrote in the notepad she pulled out of her pocket.
She would wait for the next. It was empty now, the station, but she sensed the vaporous trails of people in a hurry. They shuffled quickly out of the rectangular silver cars, down the steps, past the angular grafitti, past the man singing off key, up the next set of steps, and to a different platform.
“A bridge across the tracks would be faster,” she thought. A retractable bridge with warning lights that dinged and flaired before folding up on you as trains crept in.
Trains don’t creep. They are railed bullets with windows. They brought her here; they would take her away. They were agents of birth and death, in and out of chrome and concrete wombs. Such an intricate arrival and departure schedule. The woman in the control booth and the man beside her — they ate donuts and drank coffee. It was fresh; she could smell it. The woman laughed loudly through the plexiglass, and she noted they must feel a lot like God. A small black toggle switch could cancel or delay her journey at any time.
She watched the board without blinking. The 15:08 to Stuttgart, and she had never felt so vulnerable.
