A Train Ride
Have you ever been riding on a train, and played scenes through in your head of what you could do right then and there?
There is a homeless man I see every day. He comes into my university, into the library, and sits at a computer from when it opens until close. There is a booking system; people can get very touchy if you are in their seat when they have it booked.
This homeless man has a particularly bitter distaste towards me. To him I look as if I'd taste like hydrochloric acid. I have the same unexplained hatred towards him. He is always wearing the same stenchy old jacket that is much too big, held together only by a strand of string. Underneath is a rancid filthy grey shirt. He wears grease stained jeans tucked into his knee-length socks. I despise him. His hideous face looks like he has lost his jaw in an horrible war accident. There is a look of bewildered accusation in his bulgy bloodshot eyes.
We have had arguments over my chair. Is it still an argument with only one person screaming? His childishness consists of blatant name calling, while stamping his
authority on the ground like a furious chimpanzee. "You chair thieving
scoundrel!"
As I was on the train, with at least an hour of time I knew I had to sit through, a delusion of grandeur slowly overtook my reality. I realised that this man, the chair-nazi you are now aquainted with, was sitting in this carriage. We were the only two passengers. I was sitting in the five seater near the stairs on the bottom floor, he was about three quarters of the way down the carriage, pre-occupied with staring at something; probably an insect or stain. As I stood up, my shoulders sat much broader than I remembered, and I was standing with an unusual confidence.
I strode to the virile offender and fixed him a look of hatred that was felt all the way through me, it pulsed warmly as nodes into every vein. Pure rage projected my thoughts onto my eyes, the homeless man saw a premonition of his demise on the surface of my pupils. I saw him writhing with agony in the reflection on his eyes, which animated him thrusting about in all sorts of odd movements, looking as if trying to find his marbles with one hand, while cupping his hand to the sky with the other; a gesture of total embodiment of desperation. What atrocity was I about to commit that he was reacting to? This thought was rather perplexing, and I began to concentrate on it, thus taking away from my anger. As a reaction, rage took possession of my body.
Quietly I was sucked backwards into a vacuum; a long, long tunnel, all black fire and darkness. The echo turned all sound into a hellish wailing. I could see out of the eyes that were mine only seconds ago. The shadow of me reached forward with his left hand, and viced the Adam's apple of the homeless man into a mass of broken shards held inside its neck by a pouch of skin. Somehow this crunch only fueled my puppeteer. My fear of life imprisonment must have reached the mind of the demon then, because he darted his head in both directions; no one.
I gasped, a faint whisper inside the tunnel. I saw a family of three that were about to board the carriage we were on standing on a station platform. The parents stood bored, waiting for the train to stop completely. Their young girl, however, was looking into every window of the train, and pointed slack-jawed at us when she saw. This was it, I thought, I'm fucked. I waited.
But no, they didn't hop on. I didn’t even notice the train had already stopped until I realised we were moving again away from the platform. The family were like wax cutouts now; like the ad that is on before a video begins; the one where the mum covers her kids eyes, and has a hand to her mouth, while the dad just stares.... I doubt they were breathing. The relief that they were there not here made me so calm that I relaxed a little.
You hear a rope snap tight, you hear the insides of a human burst out of the incision across the abdomen and onto the ground as the body jerks and bounces ever so slightly upwards. The neck has snapped, but the head won't fall off.
What you heard was the demon's fingers dig into flesh, causing as much pain to my hand as the poor homeless man. Then you heard his insides roll out, and slowly unreel onto the carpet, as if unwinding chain from around a steel rod. In actuality, this didn't make much noise, but we didn't know that - all of our senses were overloaded and off the dial. Then you heard his hip snap, that was the neck. My puppeteered hand pulled at the entrance to the side of the man's left hip
and snapped off a portion like a shard of porcelain.
The screams became deafening at that point, but that didn't bother me. I was beyond repair, and I couldn't hear a god damned thing. The end of the tunnel I was looking out of slowly shrank and shriveled, I felt my body shudder with the shock. Falling into darkness backwards and watching my vision and sound become the speck of a television that's been turned off, that's all I remember. I hated that man.