NEW FICTION

Crowded. I move across the car and stand in the doorway. It’s the rear of the front end of a double car. Just before the train leaves the station, a tall, thin man hurries on and thumps down into the empty aisle seat by the door across from me. He looks up at me. Then he looks again. He keeps doing it. I take my book, an Alice Munro collection, out of my bag, open it to the next story, “Free Radicals.” Then I realize I’m standing in the doorway on the side of the train on which at each stop the doors will open, so I gather up my bag and slide across the aisle to stand in the opposite doorway. Two seconds later, the man who had repeatedly looked at me jumps up out of his seat and stands right beside me. 

He stands very close to me, looking straight ahead. But whatever. It’s a free train. I take my book out, open it back up. “Free Radicals,” here we go. As I read the opening lines, the man standing next to me takes out his phone and with it plays some hip-hop at top volume. I stand there. I’ll admit I had wanted to move when the man first jumped up and stood next to me, because there seemed to be no good reason for him to have done it, but I thought it wouldn’t be polite to move. I still have those thoughts sometimes, even after years of this commute. Now I know he’s fucking with me and has been ever since he hopped on the train just before the doors closed. Is it the jacket? The tie? I don’t know. My face?

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!