#97

Milky rivulets cut across the subway floor.

Someone had dropped an ice cream cone several stops before she had to get on. The longer she sat waiting to get home, the longer the chains of melted sweetness grew around her. If she let her feet go without thinking, it could turn into a disaster later. So she sat still. She concentrated on not moving.

Trapped, she let her mind drift to the class she had just come from, to the paper she had gotten back, to the comment that her writing was icy cold and impersonal. And then to even earlier, to the morning, to when she took the train in the opposite direction, to when she sat and looked up to notice a man sitting across from her drawing in thin black ink on thick white paper, to when she recognized he was drawing her—the messy waves in her hair down to the checkerboard pattern on her shoes, to when she discovered she not know how to act when one discovers they are being drawn, to when she sat perfectly still.