A Rough Sketch of a Woman on Her Way Home

She could hear the rattle of the train, the clanking against the tracks. No matter to what volume she set
her music, she could hear the rattle of the train as clear as if it were the only sound in the vast expanse
of the universe--a deafening noise, a consuming sensation, for she could feel it too, traveling up her
spine. She could not taste it as far as she could tell. A taste of must and sorrow and emptiness and
cigarette smoke lingered on her tongue, which very well could have been the rattle of the train in her
mouth, but she had no empirical evidence with which she could make that claim. She could, however,
see the train rattle or, rather, could see the effects of its rattling. Various men and women and children
bounced, ever so slightly, up and down, their hands shaking against the railings onto which they held.

It had been a tough couple of days, not tough enough to make one question their own mortality but
certainly close, though for her a stubbed toe would conjure up those thoughts (of death, the finite
nature of life-the-universe-and-everything and other topics of a similar, bleak nature). That said, it had
still been tough couple of days. Tough enough to make her cling to her belongings with a fierce intensity,
her purse and her glasses and even the clothes on her back, sprouting extra limbs like a paranoid,
Caucasian, female, and human Shiva, and clenching her possessions as if she expected the very hand of
God to steal them instead of the hand of a coke-influenced assailant as was customary at this time of
night. Of course, the strength of her grip mattered little. If God wanted her purse, as trivial as it was, he
would have her purse. Still, her grip never loosened, for it had been a tough couple of days, tough
enough to make her irrational. Tough enough to make the rattling of the train, that all-consuming
sensation, as irritating as it was euphoric. Though she could not form an opinion on the issue or on any
issue; she would not allow herself. It was not a conscious blockade, just a side effect. The music had
become too loud for thoughts, simple or complex, too loud for thoughts but not for trains. She could
hear only the reverberations of distorted guitars … and the rattling of the train. Strained voice,
belonging to either Johnny Rotten or Joey Ramone (she was only half-listening), and the rattle of the
train.

In the clutter and in the cacophonous unease and in the bastardization of sound, she heard a voice.
Perhaps the voice of a saint, speaking to her with the ease of a close friend, drowned out by punk rock
mantras and a persistent rattling of a train that was moving but seemed, in her perspective, fixed in one
singular location--her head--yet she imagined it preposterous to be aboard a train traveling through her
own being. Certain things were not even metaphysically possible. However, that was the feeling, no
doubt caused by the rattling, the shaking, the discomfort of the train.

At some point, she turned off the music so that she could hear the voice of the saint, so as not to
miss some sort of divine, presumably profound, message. It was shortly after turning off the music, a
task completed far too long after the initial thought giving birth to it, that she realized the voice did not
belong to a saint or a number of saints but instead to a man clothed in Dallas Mavericks attire and a
royal blue bandanna wrapped around the top of his head. He had a pair of gold earrings, round like
halos and almost as gaudy as the tan shade of his sun-warped skin. Also on his face, aside from the
earrings and a handful of impressive scars, was a scraggly goatee suggesting he did not own a razor or a
bathroom in which to keep it. There was no mistaking him; this man was a pirate, a pirate who enjoyed
basketball as much as he enjoyed plundering the high seas. It seemed also that Black Beard, as she had
named him, had not only begun a conversation with her but had continued it without her assistance,
conscious assistance that is. This man, desperate for conversation, could have continued on without her,
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but she figured the proper thing to do would be to find her place in a conversation of which she was
technically already a part, a fairly essential part but still disposable. It was odd, yes, but not so odd that
she would pass up the opportunity to converse with a real life, supposed pirate, presuming this would
be her first and only opportunity to converse with a real life, supposed pirate—what an excellent status
update that would make.

“Buncha weirdos out here. On the bus, I mean.” He even sounded like a pirate. His voice bore an
unshakable grit that suggested decades of experience, tough enough to turn even the softest of
individuals into a pirate. There was scratchiness to his tone as if someone had taken knives to the inside
of his esophagus and those wounds had become ubiquitous, evident in all manners of speech as they
were on his flesh. He spoke with an escalated volume as well, always having to be the loudest person in
the room. Being seated across from him, she caught the blunt force of his speech. Everyone else
received the still heavy reverberations. Blunt force described not only his speech, however, but his
persona as well, for when he talked, she felt as though she had collided with a wall of sound, feeling her
nose cave into her skull and escape at the other end. He did not notice or, rather, did not seem to notice
the discomfort he caused those around him. She imagined he would not care if he had noticed, being a
pirate and all.

“What’s that?”

“Buncha weirdos. Every other train I hop on’s gotta buncha weirdos on it.”

“Yeah, I had forty dollars snatched out of my hand the other day while I was waiting on the train.
Real creep too,” she said, eager to finally play an active role in this conversation.

“Ooh man, that’s why ya don’t—”

“I had just got it out of the ATM, y’know.”

“He musta been watchin’ you, like a vulture, just watchin’ you and waitin’.” His voice turned sinister
as he became more invested in the tale, placing himself in a lead role, though which role she was afraid
to pontificate.

“Didn’t even have time to put it in my pocket.”

“He just snatched it from right under your nose.” He started leaning toward her, now physically
throwing himself into the story.

“And then took off running, fast too.”

“Betchya wanted to take off after him, huh?”

“He was gone before I could even think about it.”

“A friend o’ mine had his phone stolen the other day. Y’know, some dude asked if he could borrow it
and then just sprinted away once he lended it to him. Talked about chasin’ him down, but he just kinda
stood there, dumbfounded, watchin’ him take off.”

Another lady (she was seated beside the pirate with a noticeable distance between them and leaning
away as well) weaseled her way into the conversation; she, too, must have been unable to resist the lure
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of piracy, “That’s why I don’t give money out to people when they asking for like a dollar or a quarter.
They just want to see how much ya got. Sizin’ you up and all.”

“Can’t be nice to everyone,” grunted the pirate with an eerie enthusiasm.

“No, you can’t,” replied the new party, “and it ain’t being stuck up.”

“Just want to get home safe,” she added, finally able to rejoin the discussion.

“It’s being smart.”

“Exactly!” the pirate shouted, drawing the attention of the entire train, “Otherwise, you might end
up with a knife to your throat.” He had begun to act out all of his words with the skill for pantomime one
would expect from a pirate, though, what he lacked in skill, he made up for in enthusiasm, “and then
what ya gonna do. That ain’t no position you can get away from easily, not without a’struggle.”

“Only humans,” the woman said with a world weariness typically reserved for someone far older,
“only mankind can do that.”

“I don’t think the cavemen even did that kinda stuff.”

“Animals don’t.”

“No, they don’t. Go to the zoo. Hell, you want to go to the zoo … go to the West End. That’s the zoo.”

They continued talking in this manner, about the weirdos and the various methods to deal with or
avoid those weirdos, leaning into one another in an oddly sensual manner especially given the
conversation at hand. Occasionally, she would try and rejoin the discussion with mild success, but the
two were engrossed in each other, in each other’s words, eyes and bodies. Each mention of a weirdo or
a weird encounter with a weirdo aroused the listening party. Though, the content had little to do with
the arousal. It was the tone, hushed and sexy, that had taken this conversation from general chit-chat to
courtship. The pirate’s grit turned smooth, Rhythm & Blues smooth, smooth jazz smooth, baby’s bottom
smooth. Even she found herself attracted, though not enough to act on it. It had been a tough couple of
days but not that tough. Eventually, as the conversation wore onward and she found that her
participation in it had dwindled back to its original status of non-participation, she determined that this
new party, seated beside the pirate, was not only old in regards to this discussion but also old in regards
to her relationship with the pirate. She could not say with certainty her deduction was fact even when
she witnessed the two, woman and pirate, embrace in a kiss passionate enough to rival the rattle of the
train in sensational consumption, yet she believed her suspicions justified as a result of the action. They
kissed with the passion of lovers torn asunder and reunited for one brief and final moment of fervent
catharsis, so that neither party would be capable of feeling again upon renewed separation. As far as
she could tell, however, they had neither been separated nor reunited but were instead titillated by a
shared disdain for weirdos.

That was when she bowed out of the conversation altogether, pretending to have arrived at her stop
and walking further down the train instead of departing it, though the couple did not notice either way.
The faces of the train, not manufactured with the train but a part of it nonetheless, stared in her
direction as she walked. They stared, of course, at the pirate and his mate--henceforth known as No
Beard as she had recently realized this woman was a pirate as well. She did not look like a pirate, but she
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possessed the same veracity and voraciousness of a pirate. Not to mention, she had a similar bizarre
sense of fashion, dressing in the boldest of colors with gaudiest of jewelry. Her hoop earrings, if lit on
fire, could be used in circus acts, and her sun dress was stolen straight from the wardrobe of a Nubian
Goddess. And while she knew that Black Beard and No Beard owned the collective gaze of the train, she
could not help but glance around with what she considered a mix of paranoia and narcissism. After all, it
had been a tough couple of days, tough enough to make even the most adorable toddler seem capable
of petty larceny, and how adorable those faces were (the toddlers, that is), pressed against the bosoms
of their mothers and attached, zealously, to the pant legs of their fathers. Her paranoia, as she looked
upon the faces of the next generation of weirdos, turned sentimental, longing even, then back to
general paranoia after she caught the wayward glance of a potential assailant--only three years old, yes,
but able to commit atrocities unmentionable.

There were a bunch of weirdos, yes, a beautiful collection of weirdos—united by the rattle of the
train and a shared metroplex. She noticed each and every one of them as she glanced around the train,
and all of them had experienced a tough couple of days at some point in their lives, if not now then
soon, tough enough to garner suspicion from her awkward shuffling to a new seat and wayward glances
around the train. Do you want to go to the zoo? Stay where you are seated or standing or kneeling or
what have you, and it will come to you. Chances are you have already arrived. The zoo moved
continuously, floating like a metaphysical rendition of Noah’s Ark. Only the animals were not grouped in
pairs. They were grouped in a variety of numbers, and some were not grouped at all. Many believe the
zoo to be a stationary location, a place one can visit in order to gawk at monkeys swinging from rope to
rope and picking insects off their monkey brethren, but it moved across continents and oceans alike.

She was stationary, now seated in her new seat, technically moving, technically always moving on
some level or another depending on how you define a person—molecular or otherwise. They were
stationary too, the weirdos, pirates included, yet they, and her too, were all a part of the moving zoo.
That is to say that she considered them stationary, considered them to be a part of the moving zoo as
well, acknowledging the potential fallacy in her silent ruminations, for it is one thing to proclaim
someone stationary and another thing entirely to prove it. She could prove very little. Often, she could
not even prove matters that pertained only to her. For instance, she could not prove whether this new
seat disappointed her because it lacked any pirates in close proximity or because of the obese
gentleman beside her with a foul body odor that could have made the entirety of the animal kingdom,
of which they both were a part, clench its nose. Likely, both played a significant role in the
disappointment, but she possessed no method to prove the theory aside from interrogating her fickle
psyche which, in any given instant, could be or could not be a fan of bluegrass and was deemed
unreliable by a committee (also in her psyche) because of such.

As a pleasant woman, though somewhat robotic, called out the stops as they came along in varying
intervals, she eyed the passengers as they exited, eyeing those whose ears perked up when the next
stop was called as well. She even made a game of it. While approaching each stop, she would guess
which people would depart at that particular stop. It kept her occupied while she awaited her own
departure, so occupied that she almost forgot about the rattle of the train and the weirdos and the
pirates—though, by now, she figured she was incapable of forgetting anything, that the thoughts she
had now would be the thoughts she had forever.
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Eventually, her stop did arrive, and she wondered if anyone successfully predicted her departure
though she reckoned she was one of few participants in the game. It was an odd occasion, departure,
one that still had the capacity to surprise despite being expected. After forty-minutes awaiting its arrival,
there was that brief moment of disbelief when the pleasant woman came over the intercom to
announce the coming of the next station, “You are here.”

“I am here?”

Here, there, wherever, she would believe she had arrived when she saw the signs outside her
window, confirming what the pleasant woman had just said, and as she stepped toward here or there or
wherever, she imagined that she would leave behind the rattle of the train and that the weirdos would
fade into distant memories and blurry faces and that the pirates would set sail onto the high seas,
forever leaving her mind. Yet the rattle of the train persisted, bringing the weirdos and the pirates
alongside it, and when she laid down that night in her bed, in her motionless bed, with the noises
sounding from the TV in the corner of her room, she could still feel the rattle of the train, still hear it
rattling against the tracks, still see the weirdos lined up along the walls and peering out the windows,
searching for something nonexistent, and she reasoned that she would never not feel it, that the rattle
of the train was forever a part of the moving zoo, inseparable.