Writing Assignment 7

The train is full of strangers, as trains almost always are. It is stationary. The doors agape as still more strangers traipse aboard, alone or in groups. Cold air breathes in, and with it seeps the silence that is so often found in such places. Strangers sat together in an enclosed space. It is night. The lights are bright but yield little warmth.

The doors croon their closing song, a forlorn sound from which all urgency is lost into the night. The last passenger steps onto the train. The doors close.

She is drunk.

As the train moves she staggers and collapses into an empty carpet-coloured seat, falling into place amongst silent strangers.

She breaks the silence.

She begins to slur strange words in a strange language. A Latin language, but it doesn't matter which. The importance lies only in the fact that no one understands it, and no one understands her. The strangers shift uncomfortably. She begins to shout. Her features wild and angry, expressions marred by the viscous slowness of alcohol in the blood. Her hair wild and dark, her clothes, too, a swathe of darkness about wild limbs. Her eyes teary. Glaring. Wild. All the while shouting, muttering, uttering.

The strangers eyes seek something else, anything else but her; invariably they find the floor, occasionally other eyes, the eyes of other strangers, and something is communicated, some fleeting yet pervasive sense of discomfort. She stands, staggers, shouts louder, directing her strange words at no one in particular yet everyone all at once. Gesturing. The scent of alcohol on her breath is palpable, though no one can smell it. She stands and sways, shouts and spits and sits down again. Eyes look elsewhere.

The train roars through black-dark tunnels. The strangers sway. Shoulders bump. Hands that briefly brushed are snatched back apologetically.


She turns and speaks her tongues to someone else. To everyone else. To no one else. Guttural sounds that made no sense. Or rather, no verbal sense. Sense is made on another level, a primal level, more gut-felt, more profound. I am angry. I am angry and frightened. I am frightened and confused. I am hurting and I want to hurt. I want to hurt and I want to hurt myself. I want hurt myself as I am angry. I am angry. I hate you all. I hate you all and I hate myself. I am angry.


The train lights splutter.

From her pocket she draws a packet of cigarettes. All eyes lift from the floor to follow, with disbelief, the shaky trajectory of her hand from box to lip. Then she pulls out a box of matches.

The train swerves again, more violently. The box falls to the floor and the eyes follow it, see the explosive scatter of match sticks about their feet.

Silence.

Despair, despair, helplessness, uselessness, shame, hate, hate, despair.

The train stops and the woman, screaming a dying tirade at everyone and no one, flees the carriage like a wild, dark bird. Cawing, jabbering, into the night. Leaving the strangers to their silence, which seeps back down from the ceiling and settles into her empty, match-strewn seat.