The World Takes.
That train corridor from D.C. to Penn Station is like looking at a giant’s backside as he slowly sinks toward you. It takes four hours or so to be squashed flat in the seat of the ailing recliner, made all the more… scottish by the perpetual grey wet damp of late afternoon.
I thought I was a dog in the chair, about to yelp while nimbly getting out of the way, but I realized I was slightly smaller: an aging cat with a sense of outrage minus the six million dollar leaping ability.
After a thousand blackened back porches of tenements butting up to the tracks, armies of warrior skylarks, monte carlos and K cars in skeleton poses of defiance (there is no escape from your creek bed, no matter how tirelessly you spin your red rims), and tons of crumbling 12 monkey masonry, I was reduced further:
Right past mouse, down to bug. Good bug? Bad bug? Still can’t tell, but possessing an exoskeleton, and a size so confoundingly small that I slip right up in the treads of the mass that descends: alive, surviving, able to tell the tale of the murky twilight of Trenton. Gliding past its own internal 5 o’clock exodus, I saw Trenton’s tentacles elongating in every direction, waving cilia of tail lights, road spray, a heavy breath of civic pride irregularly lit on a span suspended above dark water.
Night was arriving in a way that meant to teach you a lesson.
Upon detraining I immediately made for the crevices.