Julia Azzouz

Creative Writing Editor

A homeless man with a shaved head sits in a concrete corner outside the train station hair salon, holding an electric razor over his friend’s head. The one getting initiated has his knees tucked into his chest and stares down at the floor in meditation. The one initiating inspects the scabs on his student’s skull and understands them to be sparkling stars. With a muffled sweep, the greased locks curl into the floor. They will press their bared napes against the coolness of rough brick and discover a pair of eyes behind their ears.

By the bagel shop across the monks, there’s a woman as old as time itself wearing her shrunken face like a mask. Her wrinkles are spun from the immemorial threadbare filaments of fizzing fogs plucked from the soles of her feet. A scepter extends from the depths of her stomach to the crown of her head. Embalmed with the nectar of blissful suffering, she flounders in the shifting sands for the final breaths of smoke, knowing she will be licked clean by a lofty lolling tongue.

The apocalyptic apparitions do not impede on her trek to the bottom of the desert, and she keeps walking, whacking a carved cane into the commuters fleeing the movement of unremitting winds. She stoops gravely, letting her pashmina slap her face. Though she hunches forward towards the earth, she will fall flat on her back.

Now a little girl hurdles over yellow lines of paint that cut the platform from the train. Her mother clasps her shoulders with her worrying talons. For if the little girl betrays these imaginary divisions, she may tip over the ledge and into the one-inch violet opening, into the littered nothingness. She spills a bag of potato chips in the moving train and holds back tears as she listens to the booming whisper of the maternal soliloquy. Tomorrow she will step on the crumbs and laugh at the crunch reverberating through her bones.

Today is different, or maybe exactly the same. Some of us are left at the train station, praying for mercy underneath neon signs, sitting around starving waiting for something to happen (a buzzing tonsure, a ticking cane, a rippling crush). Others understand that the waiting is the something. The rest take the train. The rattling rails sound like thunder and the steam rising from our pores condenses itself into phosphorescence.