SciFi and Fantasy Stories: Lethal Streetlight Romances: I

Chapter I.

I don't recall the first conversation we ever had, but I will never forget the last. We were standing like lawn gnomes on the sidewalk corner by the high school, and the February snow had a false gentleness that obliterated everything in white despite its illusion of slow grace. I dearly wish it were romantic as that sounds, but it was the Friday before vacation and the buses had departed, splashing us unintentionally with their beastly tires and kicking up sand from the soggy streets. I had to squint to see him, with the frozen flakes attacking my eyes softly, and he stood there motionless like the memorial statue that rose in all its bronze glory on the lawn of the school.

          "You're seriously just going to go home?" I asked him, knowing I had a two-mile walk ahead of me if he replied yes. Not that it was the long walk that bothered me. He didn't answer, but the rapid snowfall blanketed even the growling cars in quiet, so I knew he had heard me. "Wow." I glared at him in disbelief. He was wearing the same black hoodie he always wore, and those same grey jeans, and that same green beanie. I wore my wool trench coat and knit beret and skinny jeans, all black, except for my yellow converse- as usual. There was nothing out of the ordinary except the snow.

          "Yep, I'm goin' home." He said, nonchalantly, as if he never cared.  He didn't even turn his head in my direction, just stared at the passing cars.

          I tilted my head back and let the flakes touch my eyelids and lips. I was going to call him an asshole; I was going to straighten this out with a few ugly words. But when I opened my eyes the light had turned, and he was already across the street and walking towards his house, vanishing into the foggy winter weather. "Thanks a lot, Jasper." I let myself stand there and watch him like I was in some scene from a cheesy romantic comedy, with my black messenger bag already aching on my shoulder and my bare hands red from the cold.

          I was a senior and I should have had a car, I chided myself as I started in the opposite direction. Unlike Jasper, I didn't live a three-minute walk from the school, and he even had a car, which he left in his driveway so he didn't use gas. My feet were numb and I breathed on my hands as I trudged through four inches of white powdered hell, and I let the overpasses drip on me as I walked beneath them, careful to avoid the dead pigeons and rats, which I could only make out as shapes beneath the snow. The underpasses told me I had a mile and a half to go.

          The streetlight was so teeming with the corpses of tiny moths that the dim orange light hardly reached the pavement. The August air was sweet and hot against my skin, and I enjoyed the lightness of my little black sundress. Lesley College had started up its classes again and the square was swarming with college and art school students. I passed by the Harvard Coop and felt a few stares. What fool would walk Cambridge alone at this hour, dressed like she was going to a barbecue? I had half a mind to peruse the books and potential prey inside the vast bookshop, but I was drawn to the redline station. Its dim life had always intrigued me, its underground loneliness no matter how crowded it was, and I could sit for hours on the dirty wooden benches, watching careless boys tagging any surface they could with their potent paint markers and listening to the street performers' twanging melody drifting upwards from the platform below. I didn't have to pay the fare; I walked too quickly for anyone to see me slide through the little automatic doors before they closed.

          This place had always been a part of me. After all, I had been turned here, in the black hours just before the trains stopped running. I loved the glare of the low-watt lighting on the ugly tile, and the thunderous shaking as the trains slid in and out. I watched the people get on and off the cars, toting their laptops and lugging briefcases, many with nothing but a lover attached at the elbow. Who would die tonight for my gluttony of life, I wondered, my keen eyes catching every move they made, every pore on their body. The way a boyfriend slid his hand across his girl's butt as they bustled off the train did not escape me, nor did the rattle of spray-paint cans in a young man's backpack as he walked, nor the long contemplative stare of an elderly man at the third rail. I got on the outbound as the doors were closing and sat comfortably on the near-empty car. Killing around Boston was a fool's vice, the news would pounce on it and I was quite comfortable in my tiny apartment in Southie. I would get off at Kendall Square and wander into some suburb, and take someone no one would remember, someone that nobody would miss. It got to be fun after awhile, I supposed, but I yearned to take a boy with a youthful neck and a chiseled jaw or a girl with soft breasts and shining hair. The homeless tasted always of despair.

          The rocking of the train had always soothed me, whether I needed soothing or not. I watched the windows, the blackness and then the skyline, the lit-up ads and then the blackness again. I had a strange predilection for the power of the train beneath me; it seemed the one thing that could take me down. I never thought I'd lament my human fragility, the inevitable mortality that one contemplated on those rare empty train rides.

          How strange I must have looked, sitting there in my pocketless black cotton dress, with nothing- no cell phone, no purse, not even a ring or a necklace. A robotic voice announced Kendall Square and I stood quickly, to the shock of the other two passengers. I gave them a venomous smile and vanished onto the train station. I could feel their confusion lingering like a strange scent even as the redline roared away, and I chuckled to myself. It didn't matter anymore. It was only nine-thirty, and I had at least eight more hours of darkness, so I lingered against the grimy wall and watched the people with their hot beating hearts breath the August air.