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.
And then there was this strange little in-between moment, right. After the train came to a stop but before the doors opened. Because all those shuddering bumps and screechings of the train as it arrived, that whole awful uneven tangled halt, that’s actually pretty well within the realm of normal for a train in Manhattan arriving to a station, and for those who didn’t see what happened beforehand, for all those people inside the train who never took that same breath as the crowd outside, they were just in a subway car in a subway station. Some of them had reached their destination and some of them were still on their way and none of them were really looking at what they were looking at, they were just packed in a little too tightly and standing a little too close and mostly just doing their best to keep their balance as the train slowed, until the cars finally came to a complete stop and some of the passengers stood and gathered at the doors and only then did they really look out the car windows, after the train had shuddered over the woman and child but before the doors had opened, and only then did they see this astonished multitude of humans, staring at them, eyes wide and mouths open, absolutely aghast. This crowd of strangers on the platform gaping at them like they’d just murdered someone in cold blood.
And then the train doors clicked, and slowly slid, open.
The morning after Sebastian told me that he was planning to have a child with another woman, I woke up with the taste of bile already in my mouth. This morning sickness had been normal to me for a few weeks by then, but at the same time nothing about that morning felt normal and I went to the bathroom and threw up once in the toilet and once in the sink and then packed a small bag of essentials, wrote a short note and left it on the kitchen table, and drove directly out to my mother’s in Worcester. I didn’t feel like I was going very fast but whenever I looked down at the speedometer I found that I was speeding, often by twenty miles an hour or more. The sky was heavy with clouds. Every scene that I drove past seemed staged, bleeding at the edges with too much meaning, like photographs in a museum. I tried to listen to music three different times before I finally gave up and drove in silence.
When I arrived, I placed my bag at the foot of the stairs and told my mother that I was moving back home for a little while and then I immediately lay down on the floor, facedown on the hardwood floor, and spread my arms out wide on either side, like I was trying to wrap the house all the way around, or like I had just fallen from the sky.
“Well,” my mother said, the floorboards creaking beneath her feet as she stepped around me, “this is a surprise.”
“I’m sorry to,” I began, and then paused to let my mother stand and remove the kettle from the heat. She found two mugs in the cupboard and poured them full of hot water and then dropped a tea bag into each.
“Tell me why you’re here,” she said.
“I’m sorry to barge in on you like this.” I accepted the proffered mug with both hands, wrapping my palms around the warm sides, and took a too-early sip. The water scalded the tip of my tongue.
My mother took the seat across the table from me. “You’re just lucky it’s a Saturday and I was here to let you in.”
I nodded and blew across the top of my tea, to cool it. My mother ran her art therapy practice in a tiny office just outside downtown Worcester, where she worked long hours during the week. I’d never found the right way to tell her that my relationship with Sebastian was open.
“So, let me guess. Your husband’s murdered someone,” she surmised. “And he wanted help hiding the body, but you refused.”
I snorted, and a bit of tea spilled over the edge of the mug and onto my hand. “If he’d only,” I said, but then stopped again. I blinked at the droplets of steaming liquid on my fingers, feeling the pain on my skin.
“If he’d only told you beforehand.”
Tears had started to pearl in the corners of my eyes, as if spontaneously, but I was determined to ignore them. I wiped my fingers on the tablecloth and my mother narrowed her gaze at my hands, stood and handed me a cloth napkin. I wiped my fingers again on the napkin.
“Yes,” I said.
“Or is it that,” she went on, her voice only slightly quieter, “he cheated on you and you’ve murdered him, and now you need help hiding his body.”
I laid the cloth napkin flat on the table and smoothed it carefully with my hands, until there were no wrinkles in its surface. It was an old cloth, plaid, that I couldn’t remember my mother ever not having. I knew how it smelled without smelling it.
“I don’t think I want to talk about this all just yet,” I said, “if that’s all right.”
My mother looked at me and I looked at the napkin. I lifted the cloth to my nose and inhaled.
“You’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like,” she said.
I put the napkin back down and smoothed it again with my hands, concentrating hard on the feeling of the cloth against my skin, so much like the feeling of bedsheets upon waking. My mother stood and walked to the fridge and opened the door and stuck her head inside.
“We may, however,” she said, “have to eat out for lunch.”
__________________________________
From Likeness by Samsun Knight. Used with permission of the publisher, published by the University of Iowa Press. Copyright © 2025 by Samsun Knight.
