Talking to Strangers
Lynn McGee
Fiona thinks her personality is locked under ice that only THC — the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis — can thaw. “Without it, I’m silent, sullen, boring,” she writes in her journal, and she’s not entirely wrong. One hit from the weighty little steel tube sold to her by a curvy woman in a fuzzy sweater at the weed shop on Seventh Avenue, and her disposition lightens. A surge of dopamine washes over the furrows in her brain, and puts her in the mood for conversation with strangers.
Here’s an example. It’s midafternoon. She’s still a little high when she gets on the uptown 2 train, and the car is almost empty. A man across the aisle is sitting back with his eyes closed, earbuds embedded. Fiona is listening with her own earbuds to news about a group of young men in dark suits and white shirts in Atlanta that attacked another man at a bus stop because he had what a speaker at the rally they had just left, referred to as a “subversive style” — a yellow cropped T-shirt showcasing his tight abs, and velvet purple parachute pants.
When the news podcast ends, Fiona looks up and takes in the attire of a fellow passenger sitting across the aisle. His red hoodie is silkscreened with the words “Goat,” “Slay” and “Legend,” intended to look like graffiti. His red basketball shoes have gold laces. He’s sporting a chunky gold chain necklace and his cobalt blue mohawk rises like a cockatiel’s fanned-out crest. Even the orbital sockets around his eyes had been carefully curated, outlined in micro tattoos of bluebirds that have a vintage Disney vibe. When he takes out his ear buds, sits forward in his seat and rests his chin on the heel of his hand, Fiona addresses him. “Excuse me,” she says. “If you don’t mind my asking, do you think we’re safer here, than in other cities?”
“What was that?” the man says, his face registering alarm that he quickly gets under control. “You mean because of that thing in Atlanta?”
Their exchange startles a teenager in a navy school uniform who gets up and hurries down the subway aisle. An older man in a doorman uniform sits up straight, staring at Fiona and the man with the blue mohawk as if his TV remote had finally hit on something good to watch.
“I guess you could say I’m staying aware of my surroundings, whatever city I’m in,” the man says, in response to Fiona’s question. “But that’s nothing new. Do you feel safe?”
Fiona brushes her straight, dark-brown bangs out of her eyes. She needs a haircut, but doesn’t trust stylists with what she called her hapa hair — hapa from the Hawaiian hapalua, meaning "half" — or what her white grandmother would call “Asian-Caucasian” hair. Fiona is wearing a short corduroy skirt and tights with a brown-and-yellow, houndstooth pattern. She crosses her legs, drawing circles with her foot. The man in the blue mohawk waits for her reply.
“No, not really,” she says. “But I always try to make sure I look as if I feel safe, if that make sense.”
“I get that,” the man says.
“Do you work in fashion? I love your style,” Fiona says, and he tells her he’s a stylist in a hair salon in the West Village.
“Any recommendations for my hair?” Fiona asks and he squints as he looks at her for a few moments.
“How old are you, twenty-five? Thirty?” he asks, and Fiona tells him she’s thirty-two. “Okay, so it’s time for you to add a little sophistication to that schoolgirl look,” he says, and suggests she try some chunky platinum streaks in her hair.
Fiona recounts this exchange in her journal, once she gets home. She read somewhere that every conversation, however banal, stimulates brain plasticity. Even brief conversations with strangers can raise dopamine levels and contribute to a feeling of well-being. Her mother had often started conversations with strangers and it had embarrassed her, as a girl. Now she would give anything to be embarrassed by her mother’s outgoingness.
It had been a long day. She was coming home from an appointment with a pathologist who took several biopsies from her thyroid and lymph glands. Once back in her apartment, she stands at the bathroom mirror and checks the thumb-sized, violet bruises on either side of her throat, injection sites she made available by lying in the patient chair with her head slightly lower than her body, chest jutting upward, head tilted back and neck exposed.
“I feel like Ann Boleyn on the guillotine,” she told the pathologist, but neither he nor his nurse heard the quip as they busily loaded a silver instrument tray lined with a white cloth. The nurse aimed an icy spray at Fiona’s neck, and though the doctor used the finest grade needle possible — one that could extract maximum fluid while still protecting patient comfort — Fiona still had a moment of involuntary twitching that interrupted the procedure. “I must have hit a nerve,” the pathologist said, and they talked over each other, with their apologies.
That small glitch aside, the procedure went well. Once the biopsies had been collected, the nurse adjusted Fiona’s chair to a more comfortable position and gently pressed tiny adhesive bandages over the pin pricks of blood and faint violet shadows that would darken to the size of quarters by the time she went to bed that night. The three of them — the nurse, the pathologist and Fiona — continued talking while she got her bearings back and as it turns out, Fiona and the doctor had a mutual friend; actually, he was a friend of her parents, another pathologist she had mentioned as if they were chit-chatting at a cocktail party.
Fiona traces her ability to find common ground with strangers to a game she and her brother played with their mother, when they were small. “Hello, I’m Evelyn,” their mother would say, holding out her hand for Fiona to shake. “I like to ride my bike.” Fiona would then say proudly, “I’m Fiona, nice to meet you, Evelyn. And this is my little brother Warren. He likes to ride his bike, too.”
Her mother would have approved of how she handed the biopsies, Fiona thinks. And best news of all, the ominous shadows lurking on the sonogram of her throat proved to be harmless. She felt like celebrating once she was home the day of the appointment, and as soon as she entered her apartment, she took out her earrings, kicked off her shoes and took one hit on her small pipe, the warm surge of euphoria spreading from her lungs to her throat, which she inspected in the bathroom mirror.
The bruises were darker now, and reminded her of the post-mortem photos of a female victim that flashed on the screen in a crime series she’d been binging. She angled her neck toward the light over the sink for a closer look and the bruises made her think of something else, as well, another trip to the same medical center. It wasn’t her appointment; she was there for moral support as she and her mother sat in the oncologist’s office and he quietly broke the worst news possible to them. Fiona meant to be taking notes on her laptop, but instead was staring at a hula dancer figurine on the doctor’s desk. She had a similar hula figurine on the bureau in her bedroom. A friend had brought it back from a trip to Tahiti, years ago. On the night of her own throat biopsies, she tucked it lying face-up in her pajama drawer, then returned to the living room and watched another episode of the murder mystery she was following.
Fiona is curious about any kind of forensic or investigative process. She notices details in people’s appearance, patterns in their behavior, and thinks she would have made a good detective, though she ended up working as an exit counselor with the sprawling federal prison system. This was a job that didn’t even exist, when she was a psychology major in college. Then two elections in a row put more humane administrations in place and wave after wave of presidential pardons released political prisoners from their sentences — people rounded up at public protests, for the most part. The new house and senate also passed bills to fund mental health counseling, as well as career training and housing placement, to help the released prisoners resume their lives.
Fiona creates patient profiles that generate referrals to these services. She opens her client interviews by introducing an assessment tool similar to the one-to-ten scale that medical professionals use to gage pain management. Here’s an example. She’s sitting across the desk from a fifty-year-old man picked up by federal enforcement officers coming out of a drugstore six weeks after he attended a public rally — housing rights, immigrant rights, reproductive rights; it’s always one of the above. He's a heavyset guy, bald with soft brown eyes and a mustache. “If zero is no depression at all and ten is depression that would warrant hospitalization, I guess I’d give mine a four,” he says.
“Is there any specific setting that triggers your depression?” Fiona asks. The man looks down at his hands. “Basically, I don’t feel safe when I step out my door in the morning,” he says. “I was tracked down after I’d attended a health-care-for-all rally and facial recognition software shared my data with surveillance systems in stores, highway on-ramps and subway stations.”
Fiona has heard this before, people surprised with an arrest as they moved through their day. She hopes her next question will be less painful: “Is there any activity that alleviates your depression, even temporarily?”
She doesn’t share that she takes a hit of weed to tamp down her own darkness. Her other comfort is visiting a familiar landmark or institution she loved as a child, like the MOMA, Modern Museum of Art in midtown Manhattan. The galleries’ soaring white walls and blond wood floors cheer her instantly. The velvet, button-tufted benches are as beautiful to her as pieces in the permanent collection that she’s stood gazing at since her mother paused her stroller in front of them. When she was older, her mother let her select posters from the gift shop, and they covered the walls in her bedroom. One of these, Picasso’s “Les DeMoiselles D’Avignon,” has been reframed and is now on her adult bedroom wall. The five female figures with their sharp, geometric torsos and bold stares still intrigue her.
Fiona is thinking about that painting when her client finally answers her question about activities that lift him from the fog of depression. “I suppose it cheers me up when I see other people, strangers, acting with kindness,” he offers. “I need to believe the world is not always a treacherous place, that there are people who will guide an old man with a walker across the street or help a woman carry her stroller up the subway stairs.” Fiona nods her head slowly as she listens to the man speak. “And did you know there’s a narrow trough, just deep enough for a person who has fallen onto the subway tracks to safely lie in, as the train passes over them?” He smiles slightly, at this innovation. “I see that as evidence of kindness. Someone thought of that, of giving a person a second chance, a way to change their mind, if they threw themselves on the tracks.”
Fiona looks for the safety trough between the rails, the next time she’s waiting for the train and staring down at the tracks. A PSA, Public Safety Announcement, blares on the station loudspeaker: “Ride inside, stay alive.” Every year, a handful of youths lose their lives climbing up to the roof of the subway car so they can joy-ride lying down on the ribbed metal as it hurtles through the tunnel charred black with emission and centuries of grime. Fiona pulls her journal out of her coat pocket and makes a note: “It’s tempting to put oneself in danger, when offered speed and power. I choose instead to surround myself with carefully orchestrated order.”
Here’s an example. Fiona can take a shower in eight minutes and blow dry her hair in four. She has a dozen pairs of shoes and if she buys a new pair, she recycles an old one. She keeps a log of every book she’s read, every movie she’s watched, and once a year, she purges her files, the shredder’s metal teeth meshing as it pulls in obsolete receipts and forms, and churns them out as confetti.
She doesn’t consider her life organized, she considers it well regulated, and the purpose of that regulation is to conserve resources — her energy, space and time. “Each resource,” she writes in her journal, “relates in some way to the body’s network of systems, and those systems coexist in a symbiotic way, parts benefiting the whole.” Pleased with her entry, she looks up as the PSA discouraging teens from riding on the train roof crackles again, over the subway speaker. Fiona looks up and down the subway car to see if anyone else is listening. “Excuse me,” she says to the man with a bright orange crew cut, sitting next to her. “If you don’t mind my asking, do you think they work, these PSAs about not riding on the train roof?”
“What’s that?” the man says, and turns to look at her.
“Every year, a handful of teenagers lose their lives trying to ride on top the train,” Fiona continues. “Do you think the PSAs are a deterrent?”
“What are you, taking a poll?” the man says, amused by her question. The woman on his other side leans across his lap to speak to Fiona. “Don’t get him started,” she says with a conspiratorial smile, but it’s too late. Fiona has opened a door, and he’s walking through it.
“I think some people have to learn everything the hard way,” the man says. He takes a deep breath and looks at Fiona more closely, taking in her black fishnet stockings, red puffer coat and white patent-leather flats. “I’ve learned that the people you care about the most, are the people who can hurt you the most.” Fiona isn’t sure she agrees with that statement, but she doesn’t interrupt. “My twin brother and I learned this when we were seven. Do you want to hear about it?” Fiona nods, and the man continues. “Our mom dropped us at sleepaway camp and we had two suitcases — a large one and a tiny one — so she split our clothes up unevenly. We were supposed to divide our clothes correctly once we were settled in our cabin.”
He stretches out his legs in front of himself and crosses his feet; he’s wearing jeans and black western boots that Fiona takes note of as she waits politely for him to continue. “What we didn’t expect, was that we would be put in different cabins. It freaked us out, to be separated. And no one would listen to us. My brother, who had the tiny suitcase, wore the same clothes the whole two weeks, and when our mother picked us up, he was filthy. His T-shirt and jeans were rank, food-stained, and he smelled.”
Fiona’s eyebrows raised, as she registered this scene. “I can’t even remember what we did at camp,” the man says. “I can’t remember if it was swimming, making a campfire — it’s a complete blank. All I remember is that they brought me and my brother together on our last day and made us stand at the edge of the parking lot, waiting for our mother. And then, there she was, walking toward us like a goddess in her white slacks and that blouse with the big orange flowers. We started to run to her — we were so excited — then we saw her face. She stopped in her tracks and put her hands on her hips. She wouldn’t hug us. She was disgusted at how filthy my brother was, and furious that we hadn’t split up our clothes as she had instructed us to do. We sat in the backseat and cried all the way home, and I still feel that ache, the pain of my longing for her, on that ride.”
He slowly tapped his fist on his chest, as closure. The story was over and his companion said quietly, “I think you upset her,” nodding at Fiona, whose eye makeup was trickling down in a straight black line from the outer corner of each eye. Her high cheekbones were slick with tears. Her own mother, who had been much more loving, apparently, than the mother the man described, had died a few months earlier of metastatic breast cancer that was discovered when she noticed a lump in one of the lymph nodes just under her jaw, and another further down her neck.
“Sorry,” Fiona said, dabbing beneath her eyes with a tissue. “Your story kind of got to me. I’m fine. But honestly, I could use a little THC at the moment, you know?”
“THC? You mean weed?” the man said. He and his companion looked at each other in a private, knowing way. “You don’t need THC, you need TLC. Go home and get some rest. Light some candles. Order take-out.” He turned to his companion, “Am I right?” and she nodded in agreement. They stood as the train slowed to a stop at the next station, and the woman rested her hand briefly on Fiona’s shoulder as they exited through the subway door.
The train doors slid closed, and the train lurched forward. Fiona twisted around to watch through the hazy subway window, as the storyteller and his companion continued down the platform. The train left the light of the station for the darkness of the tunnel, then rose above ground into late afternoon sun at 125th Street, the tracks elevated on a viaduct that squatted like a giant spider over Broadway. The expansive Hudson River sparkled through the long row of windows on one side of the car. Fiona held her gaze on the view, and when the train descended back into the tunnel, she pulled out her journal from a coat pocket and started writing. She wasn’t feeling clever, or chatty. A warmth was rising in her solar plexus — not like the smoke of an intoxicant curling in her lungs, but something she generated herself, the release of grief compressed in a chamber, and finally starting to wake.
~ ~ ~
Sept 2026
Lynn McGee
Fiona thinks her personality is locked under ice that only THC — the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis — can thaw. “Without it, I’m silent, sullen, boring,” she writes in her journal, and she’s not entirely wrong. One hit from the weighty little steel tube sold to her by a curvy woman in a fuzzy sweater at the weed shop on Seventh Avenue, and her disposition lightens. A surge of dopamine washes over the furrows in her brain, and puts her in the mood for conversation with strangers.
Here’s an example. It’s midafternoon. She’s still a little high when she gets on the uptown 2 train, and the car is almost empty. A man across the aisle is sitting back with his eyes closed, earbuds embedded. Fiona is listening with her own earbuds to news about a group of young men in dark suits and white shirts in Atlanta that attacked another man at a bus stop because he had what a speaker at the rally they had just left, referred to as a “subversive style” — a yellow cropped T-shirt showcasing his tight abs, and velvet purple parachute pants.
When the news podcast ends, Fiona looks up and takes in the attire of a fellow passenger sitting across the aisle. His red hoodie is silkscreened with the words “Goat,” “Slay” and “Legend,” intended to look like graffiti. His red basketball shoes have gold laces. He’s sporting a chunky gold chain necklace and his cobalt blue mohawk rises like a cockatiel’s fanned-out crest. Even the orbital sockets around his eyes had been carefully curated, outlined in micro tattoos of bluebirds that have a vintage Disney vibe. When he takes out his ear buds, sits forward in his seat and rests his chin on the heel of his hand, Fiona addresses him. “Excuse me,” she says. “If you don’t mind my asking, do you think we’re safer here, than in other cities?”
“What was that?” the man says, his face registering alarm that he quickly gets under control. “You mean because of that thing in Atlanta?”
Their exchange startles a teenager in a navy school uniform who gets up and hurries down the subway aisle. An older man in a doorman uniform sits up straight, staring at Fiona and the man with the blue mohawk as if his TV remote had finally hit on something good to watch.
“I guess you could say I’m staying aware of my surroundings, whatever city I’m in,” the man says, in response to Fiona’s question. “But that’s nothing new. Do you feel safe?”
Fiona brushes her straight, dark-brown bangs out of her eyes. She needs a haircut, but doesn’t trust stylists with what she called her hapa hair — hapa from the Hawaiian hapalua, meaning "half" — or what her white grandmother would call “Asian-Caucasian” hair. Fiona is wearing a short corduroy skirt and tights with a brown-and-yellow, houndstooth pattern. She crosses her legs, drawing circles with her foot. The man in the blue mohawk waits for her reply.
“No, not really,” she says. “But I always try to make sure I look as if I feel safe, if that make sense.”
“I get that,” the man says.
“Do you work in fashion? I love your style,” Fiona says, and he tells her he’s a stylist in a hair salon in the West Village.
“Any recommendations for my hair?” Fiona asks and he squints as he looks at her for a few moments.
“How old are you, twenty-five? Thirty?” he asks, and Fiona tells him she’s thirty-two. “Okay, so it’s time for you to add a little sophistication to that schoolgirl look,” he says, and suggests she try some chunky platinum streaks in her hair.
Fiona recounts this exchange in her journal, once she gets home. She read somewhere that every conversation, however banal, stimulates brain plasticity. Even brief conversations with strangers can raise dopamine levels and contribute to a feeling of well-being. Her mother had often started conversations with strangers and it had embarrassed her, as a girl. Now she would give anything to be embarrassed by her mother’s outgoingness.
It had been a long day. She was coming home from an appointment with a pathologist who took several biopsies from her thyroid and lymph glands. Once back in her apartment, she stands at the bathroom mirror and checks the thumb-sized, violet bruises on either side of her throat, injection sites she made available by lying in the patient chair with her head slightly lower than her body, chest jutting upward, head tilted back and neck exposed.
“I feel like Ann Boleyn on the guillotine,” she told the pathologist, but neither he nor his nurse heard the quip as they busily loaded a silver instrument tray lined with a white cloth. The nurse aimed an icy spray at Fiona’s neck, and though the doctor used the finest grade needle possible — one that could extract maximum fluid while still protecting patient comfort — Fiona still had a moment of involuntary twitching that interrupted the procedure. “I must have hit a nerve,” the pathologist said, and they talked over each other, with their apologies.
That small glitch aside, the procedure went well. Once the biopsies had been collected, the nurse adjusted Fiona’s chair to a more comfortable position and gently pressed tiny adhesive bandages over the pin pricks of blood and faint violet shadows that would darken to the size of quarters by the time she went to bed that night. The three of them — the nurse, the pathologist and Fiona — continued talking while she got her bearings back and as it turns out, Fiona and the doctor had a mutual friend; actually, he was a friend of her parents, another pathologist she had mentioned as if they were chit-chatting at a cocktail party.
Fiona traces her ability to find common ground with strangers to a game she and her brother played with their mother, when they were small. “Hello, I’m Evelyn,” their mother would say, holding out her hand for Fiona to shake. “I like to ride my bike.” Fiona would then say proudly, “I’m Fiona, nice to meet you, Evelyn. And this is my little brother Warren. He likes to ride his bike, too.”
Her mother would have approved of how she handed the biopsies, Fiona thinks. And best news of all, the ominous shadows lurking on the sonogram of her throat proved to be harmless. She felt like celebrating once she was home the day of the appointment, and as soon as she entered her apartment, she took out her earrings, kicked off her shoes and took one hit on her small pipe, the warm surge of euphoria spreading from her lungs to her throat, which she inspected in the bathroom mirror.
The bruises were darker now, and reminded her of the post-mortem photos of a female victim that flashed on the screen in a crime series she’d been binging. She angled her neck toward the light over the sink for a closer look and the bruises made her think of something else, as well, another trip to the same medical center. It wasn’t her appointment; she was there for moral support as she and her mother sat in the oncologist’s office and he quietly broke the worst news possible to them. Fiona meant to be taking notes on her laptop, but instead was staring at a hula dancer figurine on the doctor’s desk. She had a similar hula figurine on the bureau in her bedroom. A friend had brought it back from a trip to Tahiti, years ago. On the night of her own throat biopsies, she tucked it lying face-up in her pajama drawer, then returned to the living room and watched another episode of the murder mystery she was following.
Fiona is curious about any kind of forensic or investigative process. She notices details in people’s appearance, patterns in their behavior, and thinks she would have made a good detective, though she ended up working as an exit counselor with the sprawling federal prison system. This was a job that didn’t even exist, when she was a psychology major in college. Then two elections in a row put more humane administrations in place and wave after wave of presidential pardons released political prisoners from their sentences — people rounded up at public protests, for the most part. The new house and senate also passed bills to fund mental health counseling, as well as career training and housing placement, to help the released prisoners resume their lives.
Fiona creates patient profiles that generate referrals to these services. She opens her client interviews by introducing an assessment tool similar to the one-to-ten scale that medical professionals use to gage pain management. Here’s an example. She’s sitting across the desk from a fifty-year-old man picked up by federal enforcement officers coming out of a drugstore six weeks after he attended a public rally — housing rights, immigrant rights, reproductive rights; it’s always one of the above. He's a heavyset guy, bald with soft brown eyes and a mustache. “If zero is no depression at all and ten is depression that would warrant hospitalization, I guess I’d give mine a four,” he says.
“Is there any specific setting that triggers your depression?” Fiona asks. The man looks down at his hands. “Basically, I don’t feel safe when I step out my door in the morning,” he says. “I was tracked down after I’d attended a health-care-for-all rally and facial recognition software shared my data with surveillance systems in stores, highway on-ramps and subway stations.”
Fiona has heard this before, people surprised with an arrest as they moved through their day. She hopes her next question will be less painful: “Is there any activity that alleviates your depression, even temporarily?”
She doesn’t share that she takes a hit of weed to tamp down her own darkness. Her other comfort is visiting a familiar landmark or institution she loved as a child, like the MOMA, Modern Museum of Art in midtown Manhattan. The galleries’ soaring white walls and blond wood floors cheer her instantly. The velvet, button-tufted benches are as beautiful to her as pieces in the permanent collection that she’s stood gazing at since her mother paused her stroller in front of them. When she was older, her mother let her select posters from the gift shop, and they covered the walls in her bedroom. One of these, Picasso’s “Les DeMoiselles D’Avignon,” has been reframed and is now on her adult bedroom wall. The five female figures with their sharp, geometric torsos and bold stares still intrigue her.
Fiona is thinking about that painting when her client finally answers her question about activities that lift him from the fog of depression. “I suppose it cheers me up when I see other people, strangers, acting with kindness,” he offers. “I need to believe the world is not always a treacherous place, that there are people who will guide an old man with a walker across the street or help a woman carry her stroller up the subway stairs.” Fiona nods her head slowly as she listens to the man speak. “And did you know there’s a narrow trough, just deep enough for a person who has fallen onto the subway tracks to safely lie in, as the train passes over them?” He smiles slightly, at this innovation. “I see that as evidence of kindness. Someone thought of that, of giving a person a second chance, a way to change their mind, if they threw themselves on the tracks.”
Fiona looks for the safety trough between the rails, the next time she’s waiting for the train and staring down at the tracks. A PSA, Public Safety Announcement, blares on the station loudspeaker: “Ride inside, stay alive.” Every year, a handful of youths lose their lives climbing up to the roof of the subway car so they can joy-ride lying down on the ribbed metal as it hurtles through the tunnel charred black with emission and centuries of grime. Fiona pulls her journal out of her coat pocket and makes a note: “It’s tempting to put oneself in danger, when offered speed and power. I choose instead to surround myself with carefully orchestrated order.”
Here’s an example. Fiona can take a shower in eight minutes and blow dry her hair in four. She has a dozen pairs of shoes and if she buys a new pair, she recycles an old one. She keeps a log of every book she’s read, every movie she’s watched, and once a year, she purges her files, the shredder’s metal teeth meshing as it pulls in obsolete receipts and forms, and churns them out as confetti.
She doesn’t consider her life organized, she considers it well regulated, and the purpose of that regulation is to conserve resources — her energy, space and time. “Each resource,” she writes in her journal, “relates in some way to the body’s network of systems, and those systems coexist in a symbiotic way, parts benefiting the whole.” Pleased with her entry, she looks up as the PSA discouraging teens from riding on the train roof crackles again, over the subway speaker. Fiona looks up and down the subway car to see if anyone else is listening. “Excuse me,” she says to the man with a bright orange crew cut, sitting next to her. “If you don’t mind my asking, do you think they work, these PSAs about not riding on the train roof?”
“What’s that?” the man says, and turns to look at her.
“Every year, a handful of teenagers lose their lives trying to ride on top the train,” Fiona continues. “Do you think the PSAs are a deterrent?”
“What are you, taking a poll?” the man says, amused by her question. The woman on his other side leans across his lap to speak to Fiona. “Don’t get him started,” she says with a conspiratorial smile, but it’s too late. Fiona has opened a door, and he’s walking through it.
“I think some people have to learn everything the hard way,” the man says. He takes a deep breath and looks at Fiona more closely, taking in her black fishnet stockings, red puffer coat and white patent-leather flats. “I’ve learned that the people you care about the most, are the people who can hurt you the most.” Fiona isn’t sure she agrees with that statement, but she doesn’t interrupt. “My twin brother and I learned this when we were seven. Do you want to hear about it?” Fiona nods, and the man continues. “Our mom dropped us at sleepaway camp and we had two suitcases — a large one and a tiny one — so she split our clothes up unevenly. We were supposed to divide our clothes correctly once we were settled in our cabin.”
He stretches out his legs in front of himself and crosses his feet; he’s wearing jeans and black western boots that Fiona takes note of as she waits politely for him to continue. “What we didn’t expect, was that we would be put in different cabins. It freaked us out, to be separated. And no one would listen to us. My brother, who had the tiny suitcase, wore the same clothes the whole two weeks, and when our mother picked us up, he was filthy. His T-shirt and jeans were rank, food-stained, and he smelled.”
Fiona’s eyebrows raised, as she registered this scene. “I can’t even remember what we did at camp,” the man says. “I can’t remember if it was swimming, making a campfire — it’s a complete blank. All I remember is that they brought me and my brother together on our last day and made us stand at the edge of the parking lot, waiting for our mother. And then, there she was, walking toward us like a goddess in her white slacks and that blouse with the big orange flowers. We started to run to her — we were so excited — then we saw her face. She stopped in her tracks and put her hands on her hips. She wouldn’t hug us. She was disgusted at how filthy my brother was, and furious that we hadn’t split up our clothes as she had instructed us to do. We sat in the backseat and cried all the way home, and I still feel that ache, the pain of my longing for her, on that ride.”
He slowly tapped his fist on his chest, as closure. The story was over and his companion said quietly, “I think you upset her,” nodding at Fiona, whose eye makeup was trickling down in a straight black line from the outer corner of each eye. Her high cheekbones were slick with tears. Her own mother, who had been much more loving, apparently, than the mother the man described, had died a few months earlier of metastatic breast cancer that was discovered when she noticed a lump in one of the lymph nodes just under her jaw, and another further down her neck.
“Sorry,” Fiona said, dabbing beneath her eyes with a tissue. “Your story kind of got to me. I’m fine. But honestly, I could use a little THC at the moment, you know?”
“THC? You mean weed?” the man said. He and his companion looked at each other in a private, knowing way. “You don’t need THC, you need TLC. Go home and get some rest. Light some candles. Order take-out.” He turned to his companion, “Am I right?” and she nodded in agreement. They stood as the train slowed to a stop at the next station, and the woman rested her hand briefly on Fiona’s shoulder as they exited through the subway door.
The train doors slid closed, and the train lurched forward. Fiona twisted around to watch through the hazy subway window, as the storyteller and his companion continued down the platform. The train left the light of the station for the darkness of the tunnel, then rose above ground into late afternoon sun at 125th Street, the tracks elevated on a viaduct that squatted like a giant spider over Broadway. The expansive Hudson River sparkled through the long row of windows on one side of the car. Fiona held her gaze on the view, and when the train descended back into the tunnel, she pulled out her journal from a coat pocket and started writing. She wasn’t feeling clever, or chatty. A warmth was rising in her solar plexus — not like the smoke of an intoxicant curling in her lungs, but something she generated herself, the release of grief compressed in a chamber, and finally starting to wake.
~ ~ ~
Sept 2026
