Nightmare Fuel 2019 - Day the Second. A Guide to the NYC Subway

Less narrative for day two, I'm not sure what this is. A pose poem? A meditation? Random words on a page?

Regardless, it's atmospheric (I think)

Anubis in Hakone, by Joanna Karowicz

The Adventurer’s Guide to the New York City Subway

Go to City Hall station. When the attendant in the booth is distracted, duck under the yellow caution tape, into the old part of the station. The part that’s not been refurbished. To the old place, with character and memory.

Count the third steel door, the battered beige paint flaking off. You’ll need to push hard to force it open; no matter how many come through it always sticks. That’s just the way.

Hope that nobody heard the scrape of rusty old steel on stone.

Find the old turnstyle, one of the last to still take tokens.

Consider paying with the old-style token you found at the museum shop. The shape of a thing becomes the thing.

Consider paying with the genuine antique token you found at the estate sale last week. A dead man’s coin to enter a dead realm.

Consider jumping the turnstyle. After all, you broke a rule to be here. What’s one more?

Make your choice.

Take a moment to study the mosaics on the wall while you await the train. See that the tiles are arranged shapes of gloves, posed as if worn by invisible people. White opera gloves, dirty grey work gloves, childs’ mittens, their once cheerful colors muted by layers of grime.

Ponder your hands, and wonder what gloves you’d wear.

Now the train is here. An old one, with the genuine leather straps overhead. The car empty save for Anubis, who never remembers his stop, always rides until the end of the line, sometimes back again.

Stand clear of the closing doors.

Don’t sit to close to him; gods of death need their space, as, honestly, do you. You’re past the end of the line anyway, the last stop two streets or two decades or a thousand years behind.

Ride past the glorious old City Hall station, the one you came here to see, the one with the vaulted ceiling and gilt columns and a glorious smell of decay.

Ride until the tracks end and even Anubis has gotten off.

Ride until a stranger boards, having bought or stolen his way onto the train, meets your eye across the old car wondering just what god you are.

Leave something behind when you disembark, checking the station map for a clue as to where you are as the train rattles onward, farther past the end of the line.