The Stars Above

Ralph looked out of the open window. God, it was a beautiful night. Twenty feet below him, he could see the large city lights and packed houses, and elaborately decorated cars. Above him, where he felt he could almost reach to, were the stars. God, the stars were out tonight. It was clear and beautiful, like a painting, or, I don’t know, something beautiful.

The above ground subway train roared on through the night, but the tiny specks that were people below him did not know, or care to know what he was seeing through this phenomenal window. Ralph sighed and turned back toward the inside of the train. The florescent lights on the subway hurt his eyes, as he had been staring at the natural light of the sky for almost twenty minutes. He groaned, and looked at the ground. His whole person ached from the day. It must be, what? Nine O’ Clock now? That was late to just be getting home from work. And believe you-me, his whole body felt it. ‘Not home yet’ he reminded himself. No, he had to sit on that goddamned train for almost an hour before he reached his house. He felt so sorry for himself now, that he almost regretted thinking those kind thoughts about the sky, for the simple reason that they meant something good had happened to him. Nothing had been good about the day.

Ralph was slightly pudgy, twenty nine years old, and unmarried. In fact, he’d never kept a girlfriend longer than a month. Girls didn’t like him. He was organized in all the stupid ways and unorganized in ways he should have been. Girls always thought that having things in the right place at the right time made all the difference in life. Ralph couldn’t care less about what was where. It wasted time.

Ralph sighed again, then looked at his watch. He must have stared at it for a minute, half awake-half asleep, before the fact that he still had twenty minutes left on this godforsake mode of transportation woke him fully. He tapped his foot lightly on the near empty subway floor to the rhythm of train, until he felt a cold sensation on his back. It felt like water, but it was chilling, as though some horrible snow being was blowing on him. Not a second later, his hand instinctively found the area of discomfort, but he felt nothing. Just his back. While his brain had shifted to thinking about how he could stop this sensation, the thing had ceased itself.

Ralph grabbed his briefcase, and was thinking about switching seats, when his bladder called him. Knowing that the above ground subways had a bathroom, Ralph went in search.

There was no line, to his surprise, and he let himself in quite easily. On the side of the one stall bathroom was a grafitti that read: Ana luvs Michael. ‘Just like a girl’ he thought. Earlier in the day, he’d tried to kiss a female co worker Linda Tallman, a voluptuous hespanic american woman. She had hit him with her book and run out of the room. Women were truly weird. After all, she’d been flirting with him for the last year and a half! Women just want a handsome man who’ll tell them they’re beautiful. Beautiful-beautiful-beautiful-metaphor-metaphor-metaphor. That’s all they want to hear. Men want a real relationship built on real principles, thought Ralph, zipping up his pants. We figure, if we weren’t somewhat goodlooking, women wouldn’t have s-

Ralph froze in his tracks. The door to the restroom stood forgotten and adjacent. He looked around him. There were no passengers. The seats that they had so recently occupied were empty. Not only that, but torn. As though a lion had eaten them all and left no trace of it but the torn seats.


Continuation:

Ralph panicked. This wasn’t right. Then he realized the next strange thing-the train wasn’t moving. Ralph tried to calm down, to figure out what was wrong. He looked out of the window to his right, and the beautiful city lights now seemed like an awfully long way to fall.

Ralph turned his head slowly back into the passenger compartment of the train. His thoughts were interrupted by a jerking felling and a grinding noise as he felt the train try to move. By itself? Slowly, slowly at first, like a boat unsteadily swaying in the water. Then he felt it. A strange cold feeling on his neck and shoulders as though an ice being were giving him a massage. Ralph batted wildly at the feeling with his hands, running as though he could outrun the discomfort. He had almost made it to the next compartment, when he stopped dead in his tracks. He heard a sharp hissing sound. But he didn’t have time to think-as a glass shattering impact hit the overgrown car, sending Ralph sprawling through the air to hit the left window with a painful thwak! The train squeaked and grunted with the unfamiliar movement as it was turned fully on its side. Suspended in mid air off the track.

Ralph didn’t know if he was breathing or not. His face was thrust unceremoniously up against the glass, like a little boy fascinated with the shark tank at an aquarium. His back hurt, and his stomach was doing somersaults. Worst of all, he felt like he was covered in ice. He felt like he was being test in a cryogenics lab to see how cold a human can be without dying. He didn’t know if he thought he was going to die or whether he was scared. His brain had been turned into scrambled eggs. But his body had time to react. Ralph felt an urgency in his stomach and a burning in his throat. He turned on his side, slowly, and vomited. Ralph turned on his back and tried hard not to think. He closed his eyes and the world became a dark and silent place.

The End? God I hope not.