Wednesday, November 08, 2006

I felt like I was enclosed in the ribcage of a giant beast. Fearful, I watched as snow hungrily devoured the air, swirling in buckets and swooping gracefully to imprint itself on an eyelash or stop sign. Coordinated and lustful, the snowfall almost seemed inviting and I pondered how awful it really was being where I was, considering how the late afternoon was offering me hot chocolate and snowball fights with each fistful of fluff it threw down to the ground. I didn’t realize how slowly the world was spinning me until a moment later when the driver of the bus turned around.

I had to turn down my music to hear what he was saying and caught, “…the 41 or 36 will take a detour.” The motion shifted and I followed the eager crowd out the doors of the stopped bus.

I wasn’t expecting this. We were stopped at the C-train tracks. The bus was probably the third or fourth in line, waiting for the C-train to continue on its busy way. Stepping out of my isolated chamber into the gusts of snow, I wondered cautiously why the C-train had stopped and when I could find another way home.

I wonder if the sound a piano makes when it falls from the thirteenth floor of an apartment and crashes against the pavement would echo my sentiment when I learned what had happened.

There was a screeching sound of ambulance and police sirens. Closer, closer. I knew even then what my mind wouldn’t comprehend. I climbed the stairs of the c-train building, my feet not quite connected with the ground as if it were quicksand. Keep moving, keep moving. The cluttered groups of people, the hushed tones, the windows. The windows. It had just happened. I made my way to a window, unsure even of breath.

I had to go back a couple of times, unsure what I could see, what I wanted to see. The stretchers, the frantic movements, the heavy pressure of a train, squeezing, gnawing. With the entanglement only humans can feel in morbid strains of curiousity, I kept my eyes trained for that spot.

An outstretched hand. Dead, I thought I knew. Images flooded my brain. I can’t stay here, I can’t stay here. Flying down the steps, mind racing. How can they want to see, how can they stay? And yet something raw tugging at my jacket sleeves, pulling me back to a nightmare.

“What happened?”

“A girl got hit. She was listening to her headphones and didn’t see it and just got sideswiped.”

“No way.”

“She’s okay though, she’s alive. She was twitching, but she’s not even crying.”

“What a trooper.”

“It’s shock.”

“I guess that’s a lesson. I’m not listening to my headphones near any c-train stations, that’s for sure.”

She wasn’t dead. She had been hit in the crosswalk. She was under the train, hadn’t seen it coming. She wasn’t dead. But I had seen her hand. Her fingerprints burned into my memory. It was enough.

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