{"id":261,"date":"2013-05-22T02:27:36","date_gmt":"2013-05-22T02:27:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/?p=261"},"modified":"2013-05-22T13:30:33","modified_gmt":"2013-05-22T13:30:33","slug":"the-murmur-of-an-unknown-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/?p=261","title":{"rendered":"The Murmur of An Unknown Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other night I was riding home after a long day at work on the subway, or the T <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

I closed my eyes and for some reason imagined how horrible it would be if a bomb went off right then. \u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Like a ghost hurtling toward a finish of some sort.<\/p>\n

copyright 2013 Magnus Incognito<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":286,"href":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions\/286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christopherdonahue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}