Enhancing the River
The Moonstone Diner was in her old neighborhood. It was under the train trestle where the One Train became elevated between 116th and 137th Street. It bordered the Hudson River, although you couldn’t see the dull water from the windows.
On her way, Diana passed men seated on crates playing dominoes. Streetlights began interrupting the sunset. Once inside, she sat in a booth, ordered black coffee, and took out her sketch book, which was the size of a novel. She drew people, each a story articulated in faces and clothing. Most of the time, she practiced in the subway covertly. Now, she sketched the forms and gestures of the people around her.
She checked her sweater and jeans for graphite stains marking her as a visual artist. Thankfully, there were none. She just loved having a couple of hours to draw because her paying job devoured so much of her time. Ten hours a day in a beige-walled office.
The diner’s sounds included the sharp laughter of students as well as the sizzling of the grill. The espresso machine snorted in the background.
Her pencil snapped. “Hey!” she called. “Can anybody spare a pencil?”
Several people she’d been sketching sprinted over, offering pencils of different sizes and shapes. Some had been chewed. As Diana fingered them, she realized that some were Faber-Castell and Caran d’Ache drawing pencils in blues and greens. She figured she could use them to draw the river, though she’d turned away from it as a child playing in Riverside Park. The water was so gray.
Colored pencils could change everything. She could make the river bounce and shimmer in a sketch. In all the years she’d been drawing, she never thought of this before.
Fierce Blue
The World Trade Towers held the sunset’s reflection when it was time to leave work. Crowds departed though revolving doors, pushing their way to subways and buses.
The closest window to Diana’s desk looked out over the Hudson when she worked on the 50th floor. Close to the shoreline, the water was a dark and forceful blue. The view was like a postcard.
Monica, Diana’s boss, stayed late when the team did, having pizza delivered though a labyrinth of hallways. Her reedy voice and ready smile convinced Diana and her co-workers to do any amount of work she asked for. She stood by each of them in turn, tall and svelte with short blonde hair.
Something about the building was disquieting, especially at night. The sheer magnitude. The stark white tile in the ladies’ room leaked a hygienic deadliness.
Once, Diana rode up in a blue-lined elevator with a toddler and his mother. As soon as they started moving, the boy wouldn’t stop screaming. If Diana had not been a civilized adult, she would have joined in. The vastness of the place flummoxed almost everyone.
Eventually, Diana resigned to take a job in midtown. The pre-war office building was tiny compared to the towers.
On that clear day in September more than ten years later, the towers disintegrated in a cloud of smoke that filled the sky. Until that day, Diana could see them when she looked down the avenue where she and her toddler son lived.
Dust rained down on lower Manhattan and settled over everything. When Diana took her boy out in his stroller, she tied blue bandannas around his mouth and hers for protection. On the way to the supermarket, he’d torn off his bandanna and started crying because he had no words for the scorched odor that was everywhere. Afterwards, Diana sat with him on the couch and told him a story that he could not yet understand.
Telescoping Time
In most of Cody’s seizures, everything went blank, and he’d simply wake up what seemed like seconds later, either with his mother squatting next to him on the phone to his neurologist, or in an ambulance. She explained to him once that a two-minute seizure expanded into a millennium. Seizures telescoped time.
This seizure was different. Afterwards, his mother told him that it had gone on for a full ten minutes.
At first, he stepped into long grass. The sun was hanging low in the sky. He walked to a train station he saw in the distance and a red train stopped for him. He recognized it as a life-sized version of the model magnetic levitation train he’d built for a school science fair. This must be his contribution to the future.
His friends, Eric and Jody had shaken their heads in disbelief when he’d first shown them the model, which was the size of a Lionel train. How could he make something as complex as a maglev train? But the magnetic levitation worked. The train floated over the track he’d made for it.
Cody stepped onto the life-sized train and took a seat. The conductor asked for his ticket. He felt in his pockets but came up with nothing.
After a seizure, words got lost. It was like the letters of the alphabet simply came loose as though they were not glued tightly enough. The conductor picked up several letters from the floor and handed them to Cody. Then, he walked on. So, these were the tickets.
Outside the window, lush countryside sped by. The train flew effortlessly at high speed, just as the model had been intended to do. No friction that way.
The landscape Cody was watching was not one he had seen before. Tree trunks had a reddish tinge. His brain, which had brought the train to life, was taking him somewhere he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go. His brain was taking him away from the world that he shared with others.
Traveling involuntarily by himself was an adventure. He was in another dimension, longing to go home. He smelled his mother’s almond crescent cookies, the ones the two of them baked at Christmas: a comfort.
Was there a dining car? He knew from experience that most long-distance trains had one. How far was this train going at 300 miles per hour?
Then he was plunging upward, toward the light, as if from the bottom of a pool. Water was merging the worlds. Every bone in his body hurt as did his tongue. Blood tasted like iron filings.
He was rushing back to the lighted world, his mother sitting next to him in the ambulance. He reached for her hand and felt the pulsing warmth of her life connected to his.
After/Thought Literary 