The Murmur of An Unknown Language

The other night I was riding home after a long day at work on the subway, or the T as it is known in these parts. Life is getting somewhat back to normal here in Boston after the horror of the Marathon Bombing a month ago. I was tired and dozing off a bit. The subway car was its usual cacophony of intermittent mechanical screeches and rumbles, people conversing with one another, and people talking on their cell phones.

I closed my eyes and for some reason imagined how horrible it would be if a bomb went off right then.  The flash of the blast, the lights going off, the subway car crashing to a stop. The horror of being trapped under ground, injured, in the dark.

I opened my eyes, looked around, and dismissed those thoughts and my apparently latent fears. It was a normal commute home. And there was nothing I could do if something bad was about to happen anyway.

A little girl sat next to me with her grandmother. She had blonde curly hair, a red skirt of some fashion, white leggings and black shoes. She must have been four or five. Her grandmother had a big, old fashioned hair-do. Lots of make-up, jewelry and what I seem to recall as cat-eye glasses. The little girl was looking over her shoulder out the window of the subway car. She eventually turned all the way around in her seat to look out.

I closed my eyes and started to doze again. The little girl had been quiet but began talking to her grandmother. For some reason this seemed surprising. I couldn’t understand what they were saying because they were speaking in a language I didn’t know. I think it was Russian. At first the little girl would just say a few things and the grandmother would respond. Then the little girl became more talkative with the grandmother concurring or encouraging her now and then. They spoke in quite tones, and I couldn’t understand a word they said.

I opened my eyes. We were going through a tunnel again. The dark of the tunnel walls allowed me to see a faint reflection of myself in the window across the car from me. My doppelganger floated above the unsuspecting heads of the passengers facing me.

Like a ghost hurtling toward a finish of some sort.

copyright 2013 Magnus Incognito

 

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