Cold
by John Wesley Hull

She is underdressed. She is wearing one of those stylish hooded sweatshirts that are too thin to block the swirling wind, a sweatshirt that is nothing more than a long-sleeved shirt with a zipper running down the middle to show cleavage and skin not meant to be shown until mid-July. Her legs are equally underprepared, thin pants, only a fraction thicker than hosiery and designed to show off her ass.

It is a nice ass, though.

The train is quiet, the last run before the cars are loaded with bums and drunks looking for a warm place to sleep it off for a few hours, the sodium lights flicking past and shining into the windows from the black of the outside world. I saw her reflection in the glass when she got on, somewhere across the river, saw her try to shake off the cold and fail and I turned to get a good look at her before she sat down three seats in front of me, across the aisle. Now she is staring out at the night, watching the urban landscape turn slowly into suburbia, feeling her evening-into-morning fade into memory.

I watch the back of her head. Is she sleeping? All I can see is the back of her hood, nodding along with the clacks of the rail, every now and then slipping left or right. Where is she going? Where did she come from? On another day I might have moved seats, switched to her row so I could see if the one strand of hair I saw was blonde or brown or red, but tonight my bravado and energy is gone.

The train stops and the first drunk gets on, waddling his way through the aisle, making sure to touch the corner of every seat. She doesn’t move. I don’t move. We are bound invisibly by our tolerance of drunks. The drunk sits in the seat across from me and rests his head on the glass, closing his eyes against the harsh light from the station as it begins to slide away behind us. The clacks begin again, a steady tattoo that rumbles through the car and then the station is a memory in the night and we are all alone again, rattling our way through the countryside.

The girl’s head begins to nod forward and I can tell she is beginning to doze. The slightest of twangs seeps inside me, on a better day this is where I would make or break, sliding my way up to her and starting a random conversation, trying to get her to smile. But I’m tired now, it’s too late, or early. It’s too forced. I’m too much of a coward to do anything but watch her and muse about her day.

A concert, I thought, that is probably what she was here for, a concert with thumping bass that squeezes the chest and hot bodies scrambling against one another to get closer to the stage. Someone shouting poems into a microphone at high decibels while people around him attack their instruments with twittering fingertips. I wonder if there is alcohol on her breath, the musky scent of hops or the subtle taste of fruit or the dark tang of cola.

At the next stop something else comes on the train.

The lights at the stop are bright enough to hurt my eyes when the doors open and the cold rushes in. But somehow this cold is deeper and something inside my chest collapses in on itself and makes my lungs two useless hunks of ice. The drunk and I shudder a little, but the girl’s head barely moves.

There are slow footsteps coming behind me, a sound like boots on a wooden bridge, and as I turn to look I see a very tall man in a black hooded sweatshirt and leather jacket, the hood sweeping over his brow and showing only a pale nose. His jeans are dark and splattered with grease. I picture a wallet chain before I see one attached to a thick bulge in his back pocket. I watch him as he walks down the aisle, his arms in a dead swing, his back straight, the sleeves of his jacket just barely missing the edges of the armrests. I watch him pass me and though he does not look at me, I can feel him staring back, knowing my look.

Fear crawls up my spine to find my throat and tucks itself behind my Adam’s apple. A thick cold seeps into the air behind him as the train begins to pull slowly out of the stop and back out into the dark. The stranger is not jarred by the sudden movement of the train, nor does he grab hold of the seat in front of him. He simply keeps walking, slow, methodic, nearly in step with the clacking of the rails.

He sits next to the girl, staring forward, watching the dark.

I watch her head bob lower, full of sleep, then rise again. I see her turn her head toward the stranger. What I see of her hair is blonde, very blonde, almost white despite the yellow cast of the cabs’ lights and the black of the night behind her, slipping out of her hood and across her pale brow. The stranger continues to stare straight ahead. If they are talking, I cannot hear, but I don’t think they are.

She is too tired to remain interested in her strange seat mate so she bows her head, this time resting it on the glass.

He turns his head to her.

Nothing is sudden, everything seems to take its own time, the world turning, the train rolling along, the pattern of orange lights outside the window that illuminate nothing and obscure everything. But slowly as we four sit in the cab, me, the sleeping bum, the girl and the man in black, there is a soft tearing noise that is beginning to rise, as if someone is tearing toilet paper lengthwise down the middle of the roll. It starts off as a tickle in the back of my ear, slowly gnawing until it becomes something I can’t ignore. It is coming from the man in black. The girl somehow does not notice this. She still sits there, her head against the glass, lost in the ether.

With the tearing sound is now a gurgling, bubbling noise that is too unpleasant to ignore, and I finally find the energy to get up. My legs are weary, my head is thrumming, but something is amiss. The panic tastes like copper in my throat, thick and unyielding. I creep towards the seat, and feel cold coming from the man in black, wave after wave of cold, freezing my blood in my veins, freezing my feet to the ground.

When I get to the seat, he is there, and his hand is inside of her chest. Not on it, but in it, and here the cold is petrifying, Antarctic. I can see the blood draining from the girls face, her healthy tone being bled by this stranger. His sleeve is rolled up to reveal cold, blue skin with white hairs starting on his wrist and running up his arm. His wrist ends where her chest begins, and I can see him working his hands inside of her, taking the life from her in gulps.

He does not notice me. For half a second I believe that if I touch him to stop this strange thing, I will die. I will freeze to him like an icicle and he will shatter me into a billion pieces. But I look at the girl, her head drawn even further down the glass, her lips turning blue, her ears draining of the red from weather and being replaced by the cold blue of the dead.

I punch him in the side of his head, driving it into the seat. There is an instant when he looks at me and I feel cold energy come at me in a sudden draft that freezes the snot in my nose and makes me wince, and then he is gone in a wisp of vapor and a rush of wind. I felt the heat return, quickly and without warning and it rushes into the girl, and the color returns to her cheeks, the life returns to her skin, right down to the cleavage I noticed three stops before.

There is a second or two of me standing there, my mind still trying to catch up, when the girl’s eyes flutter open and she takes in a healthy yawn. She looks at me, a question on her face, wondering why I am standing there, my fist clenched, watching her.

I imagined what would happen if I told this girl the truth, if I told her what happened, what almost happened. Would she laugh, would she think I’m crazy? Would she understand?

Instead, I offer her my jacket. She accepts. I sat down next to her. Before I knew it, I was home.

 

JOHN WESLEY HULL lives in Atlantic City, NJ. He works at a job he despises during the day and writes stories at night to escape the reality of work the next day. He can also be found rotting away on the Internet, reading books without pictures, eating food that will probably kill him, or drinking light to moderate amounts of beer, which will also probably kill him. You will rarely find him watching television, eating black licorice, or wearing suits. He recently graduated from Atlantic Cape Community College in Mays Landing, NJ, and won the Best Prose Award for the 2008 edition of their annual literary magazine, Rewrites, for "No Valor," and also the first ACCC Communication Award for Best Fiction in the same year.

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