Writing Exercise 2 - Kyle

It was possibly six in the morning when Walt eventually left the party on South 5^th. It could have been later than that but it couldn’t have been any earlier, because the sun was up high enough in the sky to cast shadows down between the buildings. The streets were still quiet and littered. They had not yet been swept, hosed down. Walt walked in the shadows of the buildings and kept his hands in his pockets. He walked south towards the elevated train that ran above Broadway, the elevated train that ran all the way to the airport, the elevated train that rattled overhead all hours and nights and which he rode in order to get back to his own apartment.

As he approached Graham Avenue a boy in a hooded sweatshirt stepped out of a doorway and asked for a light. He came close and brought his head down into Walt’s face.

“Sorry,” said Walt. This was a lie and he knew it showed but he didn’t want to stop.

He kept moving, his feet unconscious on the sidewalk. Then another boy came around the corner. He, too wore a hooded sweatshirt and this ones eyes were red and glassed.

“Fuck him up for lying,” the new boy said.

It was unclear if Walt had heard this right. He knew the boy might not have said anything. It might have been a cough, a greeting, nothing at all.

Walt looked behind him and the first boy was following shortly behind with his head leaning forward in the cool morning air and his hands in the folds of his sweatshirt. The second boy stopped at the corner and stood looking at the street.

“Sorry, sorry,” Walt said.

He walked faster, leaning into it. He crossed the street in front of a bus and when he was on the other side, the other corner, he began to run. Walt didn’t look back but he heard the sound of footsteps behind him, knew the two kids were pursuing him, threatening, the potential for things he couldn’t face again.

Walt ran and the day began around him. Shopkeepers hefted the metal corrugated gates up into their holders. A small dark woman held a hose against the concrete, rinsing the sidewalk of cigarette butts, old half-eaten chicken wings, ketchup packets. An old man lit a cigarette, his back against a streetlight, watching Walt as he ran up Broadway underneath the tracks now, the sun casting shadowed ribs through the traintracks overhead.

At Hewes Walt took the stairs three at a time. He still did not look back, but pushed up and over the turnstiles – heard clamor behind him from the station attendant, a buzzing of a catch releasing, a door opening – and then he was running down the train platform. Out in the open there, the sun coming down on him fully now. And in the distance police sirens. Footsteps behind. Raised voices.

His breath was cold in his lungs. Sharp. Yet his feet took him ever farther, down the length of the platform to its conclusion in a narrow metal stairway that led onto the tracks themselves. A narrow walkway, long strips of soldered metal, ran alongside the tracks to the next stop, and then to the next beyond that. Walt paused for a breath, looked behind him, saw nothing, and was down the steps. The chance of a train coming was small, he knew that from having ridden the train enough, but he was forced to slow, to step cautiously. He set one foot in front of the other and continued walking, a highwire act, something requiring not conscious thought but rhythm. Beside him thick black cables ran the sides of the trestle, swaying in the light breeze that came in through the gaps between the buildings on either side of the tracks. And to his left were the dull scuffed rails running straight to Queens, running straight all the way. Walt watched the rails as he walked, one foot before the other, and thought of the line these rails made on their path out to Rockaway Beach, the straight line of it, the connection of two points.

The station ahead moved steadily closer. He was approaching it, no farther than a hundred yards out, when the rails to his left began to rattle and scream. Then the whole construction of it was shaking, too, the tracks swinging and moving as in an earthquake. The train was upon him when he turned. His only thought was that things would freeze; he would see this moment in its painful minutiae, half-moment by half-moment. But he was wrong. The train was there beside him – a slur of silver and sound and heat – and then it was beyond him, brakes squealing as it hauled to a stop at the Lorimer Street station ahead. In fact he only had this thought in retrospect, when he realized that too late, the train was gone, there had been no epiphany. There had been nothing. Just that slur of silver and the way it was the only thing for a half a second and then was gone.

Walt climbed up the metal steps to the station platform and put his hands back in his pockets. For the first time he looked behind him and there in the distance was the Hewes station. The sirens began again, this or they had always been going and it was only now that he resumed his hearing of them, and so Walt began to walk down the long emptied platform. He pushed through the emergency gate and the alarm sounded behind him. The wonk-wonk was a new alarm, a new sound for the day. Down the stairs, feet drumming, then back on the sidewalk, back on the street.

An old lady at the foot of the stairs pulled a shawl around her shoulders and watched Walt as he crossed the street. She wore large dark sunglasses and her hair was back in a bun.

“Fuck him up for lying,” she said.

Walt turned to look but there was no one there. He began to run again.