Likeness - an excerpt

 

Did you ever hear about the woman who jumped onto the subway tracks in New York, after a little boy who’d fallen in? At one of those downtown stations, where the train tracks are maybe five or six feet down from the platform, and this ten-year-old little boy was standing right on the edge when he had a seizure and fell right there onto the tracks, all those five or six feet down. It was a grand mal seizure, the worst possible kind, that started in his neck and then seemed to spread down his torso, into his arms and his legs, and he twitched while he fell and then he twitched on the tracks, lips foaming, teeth chattering, and the crowd on one side of the platform and the crowd on the other side of the platform, they all took a sharp breath at the same time. Even if they weren’t looking, even if they didn’t see, they all heard and felt that breath taken in by those around them, and they instantly—has this ever happened to you?—took that breath, too. And then they all took a step forward, a single lockstep toward the edge of the platform, forming themselves into an audience to stare down: and there was the boy, twitching: and then there was the train. The crowd turned as one body and saw the two little circles of headlights already visible at the end of the tunnel and quickly growing larger and moreover that screeching, that awful shriek of metal on metal, of industrial weight scraping around the curve and then scraping onto the straightaway and barreling directly toward the helpless little kid on the tracks, his limbs still twitching, his lips still foaming as though his whole body was crying for help as the screeching increased into a scream and the metal bulk emerged from the tunnel and the crowd, as one, stepped back.

Except for one woman—a woman my age, I believe, although I’ve never been actually entirely sure—who did not. At the same instant as the train entered the station and the crowd stepped away from the edge, one woman did not step back but instead stepped forward and then jumped down onto the tracks, right onto the middle of the tracks where the little boy was lying, where he was twitching and foaming, and she covered his little body with her own at the very same instant that the train crashed forward and over them both.

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From Likeness by Samsun Knight.