Sebastian

I sit in a subway car. There are no other people around me. Trash––insignificant bottle caps, soda cans, candy wrappers, heroin needles––rattle around with the rumble of the train. It feels humid in here. On my lap, a dusty old thing, Sebastian. I look down, reaching for my phone. I feel nothing. I dig into my pocket, my hand dragging along the inner fabric from the vague sweat that has built up through my skin. I feel nothing. I wonder how I’ll be able to text my family that I got home safely, but I guess it’s not that big of a deal. I’ll find another way to tell them. The lights in the car shudder. I can hear the screeching of the train against the tracks and it abruptly fades away as I feel a thud in the black, dotted floor. I scratch behind Sebastian’s ears, finding that the aging, greyish fur soothes me. He purrs appreciatively. He digs his claws deeper into the meridian coloured sweater on which he lies. I sigh, hearing shouts and bumping sounds coming from the car to my right. I just hope it doesn’t spill over to where I’m sitting. It’s happened before and I don’t think I’m in the mental state to deal with it properly. The train breaks abruptly, and my body is dragged in it, too. Sebastian leaps off of my lap, alarmed. He gradually makes his way back to it. I laugh slightly, scratching his neck. He looks up at me with dilated eyes. I know that he’s got to go eventually. It’s been ten years, I can’t just pretend he’ll be around for much longer. Not even in the ‘death’ sense––my new job simply doesn’t give me enough time to care for him. I can hire cat-sitters and I can still buy him food, but he goes crazy without me and I don’t think I have the heart to just give up on him and only see him at night. The train doors open. Still holding Sebastian, I get up and toss my things out of the train. I can hear the conductor saying something about the train doors needing to shut earlier than usual. When I’m finally outside, the train doors slam shut and speed on without me. I check the mural on the wall to see what stop I’m at. I’m over 45 stops away from home. I curse, reaching into my pocket for my phone again, remembering that I didn’t bring that bloody thing. Sebastian warbles about being hungry. I can’t take my hands off of him––I pet him again. His fur feels rougher than it used to, or maybe it’s just my imagination. Across the station I can see a man with dreadlocks that reach just a bit beyond his shoulder blades, wearing a reflective, black puffer jacket. He hollers, withdrawing a knife that he slowly uses to cut open his thigh. He extracts from the wound a white, wormlike creature about a foot and a half in length. He procures a lighter and delicately puts the creature, which doesn’t move, closer to the flame, gradually burning it up in the process. Blood has started to stain his white socks, turning them close to black––he stitches up the wound and pulls his pant leg back over his knee, smoothing it out. The remnants of the worm are scattered into the air by a passing silver train, which obscures my view of the man. I walk down the stairs into the deeper layers of the subway, and I find that the lights stop working at some point. Everything’s blue and semi-visible, although I can’t see particular details in the monochrome sea. It feels like I’m in some kind of a sacred cave. The farthest side of the subway station on this level has a massive hole in the wall, with pipes and wires showing faintly in the gloom. There’s a man, draped in a large Georgian flag, sleeping right next to the staircase. His bony legs stick out from under it, but the rest of his form is rendered into abstraction by his blanket. I’m afraid to wake him up. Beer bottles are littered on either sides of the narrow corridor leading to the rest of the subway platform, and as I tip-toe around them, I knock several over. I’d hate to disturb the man of his sleep and try to put them back into place so that they don’t bump into him. The subway platform itself is roughly the same as the one above it, although my eyes still haven’t adjusted to the lack of a visible light-source. At least it feels less humid here. The man draped in the Georgian flag wakes up, smashing a few of the beer bottles with his leg. He takes a look at me, as if I weren’t supposed to be there, turning around and walking up the stairs, shaking his head. Sebastian is starting to get anxious, I can feel it. He’s stopped purring. I try to console him by whispering that it’ll be okay, but I stop myself. He isn’t my child, I didn’t make him, he’s my cat. He can’t even understand me anyways. We wait together, on the platform, for what feels like hours. I’m not sure how much time truly passes, but I want it to go faster and simply can’t. Out of curiosity, I walk to the end of the platform and try tugging on the door that the MTA workers usually keep closed. It swings open and hits the wall next to it with a loud clang. Before I can peer into the darkness I hear yelling from above me and quickly but discreetly close it. Naked feet patter loudly above me. I squeeze Sebastian tighter, hoping that we’ll be able to get on the train before whoever was disturbed finds us. Just then, the K train glides into view, almost like a CGI animation. The man who was draped under the Georgian flag shambles down the stairs, shirtless. He glances at the bottles surrounding him, and I can hear him say:

“Who left… Who left all this mess around here?”

He picks two bottles up and throws them at the train, shattering them with a sound like gunshots. I can feel the blood surging around my neck. I look down at Sebastian, expecting the hair on his back to be standing up, his yellow eyes dilated as usual. He is calm. I hurriedly board the train and sit down. There’s a woman there, sitting on her phone. She’s evidently wearing makeup which adds a fake blush to the bridge of her nose and her cheeks. Her hair is black, and she wears a T-Shirt with a green skirt. The rest of the car is empty. Amongst the roar of the train and the smooth, plastic vocal tones of the voice actress telling people not to stand next to the doors of the train, I can hear faint car crash sounds coming from the woman’s phone. She giggles. At one point, she can’t help it, laughing briefly but loudly. I try to ignore her, once again expecting Sebastian to be uncomfortable around her, but he isn’t. Running my fingers over his back, I faintly feel something small and hard. I ignore it and continue, but it comes up again. Nervously, I part the fur around his shoulder and see a black tick, engorging itself on Sebastian’s aged, pale skin. I grit my teeth and pinch it, but Sebastian doesn’t notice. I pull the parasite farther and farther out from his skin until it bursts around my fingertips. I take a napkin from my pocket and wipe it off. Tired, stressed, feeling like it doesn’t matter anyway, I throw the napkin on the floor, far away from me. The train slides to a halt again and the woman, still giggling, leaves. Out of curiosity, I check Sebastian again, finding ten other ticks around his stomach. The skin around them looks diseased. Exhausted, I close my eyes, resting on my knees. I can feel the sweat rolling down my forehead. None of this makes sense. I was supposed to be home an hour ago, or at least, it feels like it. I didn’t even know that the trains went this far, I had never even seen the places that we stop at on a map before. When I open my eyes again I can see Sebastian looking at me. I reach out a hand to him, and he is silent. I close my eyes, drifting into sleep. I can still feel his eyes urgently locked onto mine. When I open them again, we’re on some stop that I vaguely recognize. When my eyes start to focus properly I realize that this, ironically, the one stop I wake up on, is the one I need to transfer to in order to get back home. I look around me in alarm, seeing that the briefcase full of my things has spilled out on to the floor. I hear the polite female voice telling me about the ‘next stop’ coming up and I grasp at everything I have, throwing what’s closest to me out the door. I pick up Sebastian and put him outside, I continue desperately throwing what’s spilled out of the suitcase out again and again and again until I see the doors as they are midway through slamming shut. I rush towards them, jamming my arm inside. I feel a crunch and suppress the pain by imagining that it doesn’t exist. The doors open automatically again and I burst out of the train. I look back at the train as it sweeps away with a sound like a waterfall. When I look back I see that the floor is covered with abstract patterns and colors alongside skeletal remnants. Skulls seem fused to the concrete floor. I see pieces of tan, magenta, and white, like unformed clay sculptures. I desperately look around I fear that I was hallucinating that I left everything in the train but a part of me knows that it isn’t the train I really am seeing the truth everything disappeared

Cold.

The realization is like my organs, my stomach fluid, have frozen. They begin to heat up, making me feel like I’m about to vomit.

My legs start to give out on me as a nameless dread drips into a massive well I never knew I had bringing with it a bucket of pure

misery and shame and every negative emotion I have ever felt

Where did he go where did Sebastian go where I never got to say goodbye to him where did he go maybe

maybe he leapt off onto the tracks maybe if I crawl down there and search hard enough I’ll

I’ll

See where everything went maybe I can still find him maybe there’s hope

A man in a neon green reflective vest comes to me and says

“It’s a new policy. We started absorbing litter through the floor, it’s cost-effective, too. Can I help you?”

And everything that I didn’t already let out becomes channeled into a wail louder than any sound I’ve ever made before

they absorbed Sebastian

all of this feels so absurd why would they do that why would it be just here why would and

yet somehow I recognize

that he’s right after all that this is real that there is no escape that Sebastian

Doesn’t hide under

the tracks he really is gone and what can I do about it all thoughts become one violent sobbing block of noise as he takes me by the arm

and guides me up the staircase as I

drool and sob I feel so ridiculous here I am acting this way over something I knew would happen

but all I can say is that I never got to say goodbye I never got to actually do anything meaningful for him that old dusty waste of space I never got to properly do

anything anything at all he doesn’t tell me I’m being hysterical he just guides me up but I fall at every step like a child learning to walk from the overwhelming wave of sensation that is pouring out of my face as if all my eyes nose and

mouth were for is letting liquid pour out

and finally when we reach the top of the staircase I see that we’re in a city and on the other side of the massive river far away is our home the sun setting and turning the whiteish city-smog yellow and I can feel myself keeling over and I can’t help

But think that this isn’t just about him but something greater but I can’t understand what that is and even now I just

wish I could have had one proper goodbye but I can’t

I can’t remember what he looks like

I’m forgetting it I can’t

How? how I was supposed to remember 10 years of the same thing day out and day

in but

I can’t

remember

He is

lost like grains of sand to the

wind