Flash Fiction: The Boston T
In the T station there was a bunch of au-pairs playing cards. Malory approached and stood a short way off and observed how the girls were throwing down cards on to a pile then looking at what they had left in their hands. The screen said the next train was due in two minutes. He was going to Harvard Square to the Coop where he intended on staying for most of the afternoon. Now that there was a coffee shop there too as well as the books he could entertain himself for hours and that was a good thing. The girls quietly played their game as a choreographed unit and yet once in a while one amongst them would look at Malory or another commuter and hold a gaze for a few moments and pop some gum or brush a lock of hair away from her eyes or push her spectacles further up her nose; one girl – the most engaging of them all – wore a hat and had thick-rimmed glasses a bit like Clark Kent. Malory watched her the way one might watch a tapir in the zoo: she was at once unfamiliar yet reminiscent of a feeling but which feeling precisely he couldn’t decide nor did he try too hard to discern. She had rouged cheeks and thick red lips and a dimple square in the middle of her chin. Her neck was unwrinkled and her loose sweater allowed a view of two emphatic collar bones that rose slightly from her throat to her shoulders at an attractively subtle angle. Malory watched and breathed and appreciated the focus of his attentions, happy to be so harmlessly entertained while waiting for the train.
When he turned his gaze to observe the train approach and to step inside the yellow line he heard a female voice:
“Up yours, Stacey! How’d you always win this stuff?”
He turned and watched again as she pushed her Clark Kents further up her nose and placed her final card on the little heap.
R.H.