Risk

Song of the Subway

Gina sat on the eastbound subway car Tuesday morning, sorting through her purse. It was a mystery to her how all this junk accumulated. She could not remember putting half this stuff in there: lip balm she hadn’t bought, hand lotion samples, movie ticket stubs, two different mini-hairspray bottles, a box of raisins, four half empty packs of gum, three keys to who knows what, balled up tissues, three emergency tampons of various brands, mints, candies, a melted mini-snickers bar and all the things that were supposed to be there, too.

She looked through a book of coupons for a sub shop, reading them to see if they were expired. She found the beat count of the lines very attractive, for some reason she couldn’t quite understand. In her head they sounded like some urgent chant or rap lyric:

Two doll-ars off an-y big sub com-bo;

One doll-ar off an-y big hot sub.

The lines repeated themselves in her head a few times, gaining momentum and emphasis with each repetition. She loved the three stressed syllables at the end of the second line, the stubbed toe in the last foot bringing you up short, recognizing the rhythm of the words and the art of someone like her beneath the lines, making them memorable. A commercialized form of poetry.

She gathered her trash in one hand and slung her purse over her shoulder as the train came to her stop. She pushed through the crowd with everyone else getting off and joined the crowd flowing towards the escalator, dumping the purse mess in the garbage on the way by. Maybe no one else would notice there was a kind of music beneath the writing of a sub coupon. Maybe it was just her. The flow of the crowd carried her down the escalator and onto the southbound transfer train without her having to even think about it. Her feet had the steps down pat.

Just as the graffiti on the wall of the subway is normally just a hodgepodge of gang signs and colored lettering, but sometimes you’d see a picture which was really good, partially covered by something else. Was she the only one who noticed a certain musicality to it, a poetry lurking beneath the quotidian that was the same as the rhythm of the coupon lines, indicating another artistic soul was out there?

The main difference between that artistic soul and hers was that he was getting his stuff out there. Her poetry sat on a bookshelf at home, trapped in a row of spiral bound notebooks she had been writing in since university. No matter how many times she told herself she would, she had never sent any of it to a literary journal for publication. What was she scared of? Nothing, obviously. But something. In the meantime, she had occasional creative outlets helping out with ad jingles and promotional copy that was tight, influential and compelling. Also soulless, hollow and cynical. But it’s a living.

It was a better fit for her than what her Georgey had with the courier company. He seemed so unhappy lately, but whenever she asked him to talk about it, he shut down and claimed everything was okay. Was he fooling himself, or her? It seemed to her that he just didn’t know how to break out of this courier mold that he had built for himself. It had hardened over time and was becoming fixed like concrete. And George was stuck. He has no idea how to break the mold and do something that would truly make him happy, and this made her groan and roll her eyes every time she thought of it. Sometimes on a crowded subway car. But even with that move, she didn’t crack the top ten weirdest people on the train.

The screeching and turning told her they were approaching Union Station and the start of another workday. The thought of Starbucks entered her mind and then she couldn’t shake it: the feeling that the only thing that would kick start her mind today was a Venti Soy Vanilla Latté with an extra shot of espresso. Damn them and their effective advertisements.