A girl seated on a
subway platform bench was playing the
keyboard. Her teeth bore the marks of obscenity and her slender
hands tightened up and quivered whenever someone threw a coin into her hat. The young man sitting next to her,
tattoos on his arms and long blond hair, rubbed his weary eyes, yawned, and stared up at the ceiling. She talked to him but he seemed not to listen, gazing instead towards the
cigarette-strewn
railroad tracks where rats, dead and live, mingled with each other.
He kept throwing
coins and aiming for the
rats. Every time he missed, the girl's hands loosened up and her teeth glimmered. "You fool," she would say and narrow her smile into an expression of bitter malice. He wouldn't even turn into her direction and merely waved her off with his right hand. She kept on playing her electric
keyboard whenever she wasn't telling him that he was a fool. He kind of liked the
music. It was melancholy. The melody was broken up by the light
drops of a smoky pungent liquid that originated from the mushy
ceiling whose strips of plaster peeled off and illuminated the dark
den as they swayed to and fro.
A person would walk by, an elderly lady with veins on her hands and hollows in her
cheeks and throw in a coin into the hat. The young girl stiffened herself up every time that happened. She assumed a position of dignity and graciously fixed the woman with a pointed gaze. But the look was in vain: the
lady had already walked away and the girl's dilated eyes turned to the rats.
The silent gray
corpses weren't that different from the old lady. These
creatures never returned a gaze either. Too quickly had they scurried along. And though she had wanted to, she was unable to make any meaningful
eye contact with them. But then again, the dead ones had a beautiful stillness to them. True, their eyes were vacant. But they never turned away.