He finally slowed to a wheezing stop as the train began to pick up speed, and I'm fairly sure he actually looked right at me just before the tunnel blocked his form from view. I empathized with his predicament: I, too, have often been just a few seconds off, and understand. I sat back on the bench seat that I alone occupied and was idly grateful that I had been on time at my stop this day.

I surveyed the car I was in. People's faces were intermittently side-lit from the tunnel's lights that flashed past the train's windows. Near me, a tall woman with short hair was staring contemplatively out at those lights as she rubbed the third finger of her right hand, as if exhilarated with the prospect of no longer having to wear a ring there. Across the aisle from her sat her exact opposite: a short, squat woman, who could probably trace her distant origins to somewhere in the mid-Pacific. She bore herself as if she viewed the entire world as a sinister leg-hold trap waiting to be triggered, and her face likewise bespoke this ever-present anxiety within her.

A man further on down the car shifted his considerable weight in a most unappealing manner, so I quickly moved my eye onwards. Beyond him, a small child and his grandmother were markedly not talking to each other; the barrier of age and interests lay unbridged between the two, and their silence was one of uncomfortable truce for the length of this train ride, however long that might be.

I looked at the billboards that were tearing at the edges, hanging from the gritty walls of the car; I looked at the upholstery of the seats, torn near down to the unhealthy and creaking framework (how anybody, after seeing that, could dare sit back and relax on a train like this, I will never know); I looked at the lights outside, filtered through windows with variously misspelled obscenities scratched into them, blurring one's view of the dark tunnel through which we all plunged forth.

My thoughts went back to the pudgy little man, sweating and swearing there on the platform at his ill-fortune as his train pulled away, inconveniencing him in some small yet irritating way. I put my hand into my trenchcoat pocket and closed my fingers around the detonator I had there, and thought that this pudgy little man, if he made the right connections when he read about all this in the next day's paper, would probably be happy that he didn't quite catch this particular train.
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