She didn’t want to admit she was afraid.
The subway train went really fast. She held onto her mother’s hand extra hard, even though they were sitting on plastic seats. It was her first time on the subway train and she wasn’t sure that she liked it very much. Over the sounds of the train and the other passengers coughing and talking, she heard a woman scream.
Turning to her mother, she saw that her mom was reading a book. “Did you hear that?” She asked her mother.
Her mother looked up from her book. She knew the word Grey and knew the colour of the cover was Blue. She wondered why her mother would want to read about anything like the colour grey. It was such an unhappy colour. Neither white nor black, nor anything else but a washed out colour. An un-colour.
“What’s that sweetheart?” Her mother said.
“I heard someone screaming.” She said.
Her mother smiled at her. “Just the wind through the tunnels.” She said. “It sounds like that sometimes when the train goes very quickly. Isn’t this exciting?”
She didn’t think it was exciting. She didn’t think it was exciting at all.
Another scream came and something slapped against the door that separated their car from the one in front of theirs. She could see the shadow of a hand slide along the glass and wondered why the hand was red, why the glass was red. Red was a happy colour or an angry colour, depending on which ones it was mixed with.
When the door opened, air rushed into the car, fluttering its fingers through the girls hair. She heard a sound that was like wailing and a woman threw herself through the door (the red door) and slammed it shut, just as something slammed against it. The sounds it made were entirely inhuman. She thought that it sounded like a wounded animal.
Her mother had dropped her book but her hand was still stuck in midair as if she were still reading. But she wasn’t looking at her book. Her mother watched the red paint that was dripping from the woman. The woman looked at all of them with wild eyes.
“Fuck,” she said. “Almost all of you have it too!” She came closer to them. “I can see clouds around almost all of you.” The woman turned to look at her. “Except for you two.”
She had been afraid but now she was terrified. Tears slid down her face even if she did not understand why she was crying yet.
That would come later.