Stranger at the Station

Two strangers meet while waiting for the midnight train.

TWS/CWS: smoking, implied cheating and alcohol consumption (off-page, all in past tense), brief mention of violence against IWTS (Indigenous women & two-spirit), reference to a dog attack (semi-vague, past tense, at the end of the story)

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The midsummer heat made Adsila’s skin itch in waves of hot and cold, and it was nothing short of infuriating.

She couldn’t quite comprehend it, summer was supposed to make her sweat out her body’s water supply, not chill it to the point of goosebumps. It didn’t make sense, and if she focused on it too much it would piss her off more. The laws of science seemed so simple in concept, never in execution. Adsila could pin that train of thought on the slow sobering of her mind, but it was just an excuse to explain the misunderstanding of her brain chemistry. And then again, she wasn’t the best at understanding much of anything. With her judge of character, she had no room to hold critique or criticism against anything.

Adsila shivered and slouched further into the metal bench, the contortions of the metal digging into her bare back and legs. She rued not snatching her jacket back from her former lover before leaving the house party. A plain red mini dress hadn’t been enough to keep herself warm at the start of the night, much less now.

In the distance, she heard a train horn blow, and her emerald gaze flicked to the wall clock on her left. 12:20 A.M. The train was five minutes late.

“Excuse me,” a sharp voice cut through the silence, echoing off the brick and tile tunnel like a gunshot. Adsila glanced to her right, where a woman stood underneath an umbrella, a sight immediately confusing since it hadn’t rained in three days. The stranger looked completely contrary, as if she was both out of place, and at home in the dingy train station. A spot of pale, pristine sophistication in the foreground of the beige, grime-ridden train station. “May I sit?” She gestured to the open space across from Adsila, and she shrugged in confirmation.

The woman hummed and sat, closing her umbrella as she did so and dropping it to the concrete floor beside her, crossing her legs over each other while her eyes fixed forward to the opposing wall.

Adsila, like a moth to a flame, shamelessly checked her out. Everything about her was as sharp as her voice. She was cut from broken glass, with a nose and brow bone to prove it. Her skin was paler than a fresh sheet of printer paper, which only served to make the rest of her features stand out. The serrated edge of her jawline, and curve of her makeup covered eyes, her dark eyebrows stuck in a flattened line, the soft plumpness of her painted-red lips, a shiny gloss reflecting in the dim lighting. Loose curls spiraled down her back, ones that emanated Marilyn Monroe if her hair was long and black and not short and bleach blonde.

She was dressed with a matching edge. Skin tight leather pants hugged the gentle curve of her waist and thighs, a matching jacket hanging off her shoulders. The biggest offense was the cropped mesh shirt that matched the pastiness of her skin, a complex black and red dragon across the expanse of the fabric, its yawning mouth just hidden by the jacket.

A storm of gray met hers when the mystery woman cut her a glance. “You’re staring.”

Adsila grinned, but looked away quickly. “So what if I am?”

The stranger blinked at her, surprised, but unfazed. She interlocked her fingers over the cross of her knees. “Mara.”

Adsila looked at her again, an eyebrow raised. “What?”

“Well if you’re going to eye me up like a Sunday dinner, it’s only fair that I introduce myself.”

Adsila cringed and snorted a laugh, introducing herself to the obscure stranger. And in the aftermath, they sat in silence. It wasn’t comforting, nor was it tense. It was the kind of silence that ached and yearned for something, anything to fill the gap. A simmering silence. An easy stillness. The kind you sat and waited in for as long as necessary until-

“Where are you headed?” Mara asked, startling Adsila with the simplicity of the question.

“Back to my apartment.” She sighed, irritation briefly lacing her words before she could correct herself. Adsila reached into the side breast of her red mini dress, pulling out a flimsy box of cigarettes and a small, clear lighter. The lighter fluid sloshed as she moved its plastic prison to the palm of her hand. She didn’t offer one to Mara, taking one out and holding it against her lips, between her index and middle finger as she lit it. The box and lighter were returned to their home in the tight fabric of her bra and the shield of the silky dress once the cigarette was lit, and the first draw was taken. “In the city. Downtown.”

Mara hummed. “I see.”

She took a draw from the cigarette, blowing the smoke out into the cold air before speaking again. “You?”

Her waiting partner glanced at her. “I’m heading downtown as well. Meeting with a few friends.”

Adsila raised a brow. “This late at night?”

Mara shrugged nonchalantly, rubbing her right eye with the pad of her middle finger. “We keep odd hours.”

Adsila chuckled at that, and her companion muttered something about hating her contacts, before speaking clearly again. “Well I hope I won’t be late.” she said, eyes blinking in readjustment before scanning the tunnel they found themselves sitting in wait. “The train’s usually on time, correct?”

“Yup.” Adsila said, putting emphasis on the final letter so it popped. “And it’s currently…” she glanced across her left at the clock again. 12:45 A.M. “thirty-five minutes behind.” She tapped her cigarette off on the side of the bench before dropping the butt of the death stick to the concrete, extinguishing it with the outsole of her black heel.

A train horn went off in the distance. Mara hummed as she blinked up at the fluorescent lights, blotting at the corner of her eye to wipe away a tear. “Well I hope it won’t be long now.”

Adsila said nothing, which was acknowledgement enough for her newfound…friend? Out of the corner of her eyes, she could see Mara tilt her head slightly in observation. “You have quite the striking look to you.”

It was Adsila’s turn to blink at her in surprise. “Pardon?”

“Do you hear that often?” she asked, gray eyes roaming over her again. “If I had to say, I think it’s in the eyes. There’s a…” Her hand rotated in the air, as if to summon the proper words. “Dullness to them. It’s very bitter. Very delicate.” Mara reached out, taking a small lock of Adsila’s auburn curls between the pads of her fingers, her touch tender. “And your hair is mesmerizing as well.”

Adsila didn’t dare move or breathe as Mara frowned. A near pout. “You should keep your hair back more.”

“I should?” The words came out in a quick, flustered rush

“Mhm.” Mara nodded, turning her body to face Adsila as best as she could with her leg still crossed over the other. “May I show you?”

Adsila simply nodded, once and curt. Mara leaned forward with a soft breath, and then her fingers were in her hair. “If you were to,” A soft and ice cold forefinger brushed tawny locks behind the skin of her ears. Her knuckles brushed the red, black and blue handmade beadwork dangling from her lobe piercing. “tuck it back behind the ears like this,” Between pale and flushed purlicues, she brushed them back and over freckled, ivory shoulders. “and back over your neck,” The loose ringlets dropped over her back, dead ends brushing the dip of her spine. “Let it rest on the space between your shoulders.”

Adsila didn’t hold stock in her ability to speak. The pads of her fingers casually brushed the plane of her shoulder as she lowered her hand. “That’s good.” She said with a subtle nod. “Much, much better.” The tip of her nails grazed the base of her neck, her index finger stretching across the skin to the opposing side of her jaw. “Your neck was completely hidden,” the touch lingered for a moment longer than necessary before pulling back completely. Her hand rested on her upper thigh, and she hadn’t broken eye contact. “That simply wouldn’t do.”

Her stare flicked down to her neck for a moment, something unknown turning in her eyes. “Forgive me if this is too bold,” Mara started, turning her gaze back up to look directly at Adsila, who said nothing. “But you have such a stately look to your neck. Carved from marble, one could say.”

Adsila laughed outright, the sound echoing off the acoustics of the platform. She could see, barely, Mara’s eyes narrow in offense. “That is by far the weirdest pickup line a girl has ever used on me!”

“It was not a pickup line!” The indignation in her serrated words make Adsila giggle more. “I was being truthful!”

“Oh I’m sure you were,” Adsila said as her laughter subsided, the seriousness of Mara’s tone hitting her at once. She looked away from her flushed embarrassment muttering a hardly audible. “Whatever you say Shakespeare.” She could just see Mara rolled her eyes, seemingly in response.

A sharp wind blew through the platform, and it was then Adsila was reminded of just how utterly freezing it was. She shivered slightly, and Mara’s red lips pulled into a smile. “Are you cold?”

“No.” The flush to her skin tattled her lie, and Mara chuckled. “Here.” Her companion said, beginning to strip the leather from her shoulder as the horn blared again, somehow sounding more distant than it had last time.

“No I don’t-”

“Yes, you do.” Mara words were said with amusement and a grin. “Consider it my thanks for letting me sit with you and interrupting the peace of your night.”

Adsila rolled her eyes with a light laugh. “Well, when you put it like that, how can I turn you down?”

“Simple. Mara relaxed back into the bench, blinking in clear annoyance at her contact lenses. “You can’t.”

“No, I suppose I can’t.” She zipped up the jacket, stopping the gold pull just above the dip of her chest. She glanced at the clock again. 1:15 A.M.

Mara’s eyes followed hers. “You know,” she said, slow and testing. “It’s quite a cold night. My home isn’t far from here, you could come and warm up. Get out of the cold for a moment until the weather shifts for the warmer.”

Adsila’s heart jumped to her throat, and the world tilted as if she was suddenly, very sharply aware of the precarious, delicate position she was in. The nature of her sharp and sudden fear was a fact not entirely clear to the naked eye, as Adsila did not look like the average Shawnee woman. At best, she looked like a scrawny white girl with a spotlight of unruly ginger curls, always so out of place and hanging on the outskirts of powwows and ceremonies. And as much as she loathed it, it afforded her privileges not everyone had. Offered her a safety she despised being able to claim. It had always felt like an unfair trade, a sliver of safety in exchange for her sense of belonging.

Regardless of that fact, her father had engraved a common truth into the marrow of her skull: no matter how friendly or attractive, you don’t go with white people you just met. That was how you met with Gitchi Manitou.

“Nah, I’m good.” Adsila said with a faux casualty, hoping it hid the ever so small fear now blooming in her chest. “But you should probably talk to your optometrist about your contacts.”

Mara sighed. “Not an issue a doctor can fix, I’m afraid. Unless they’ve figured out how to repair sensitive eyes in the centuries since I last saw them.”

Adsila rolled her eyes, and Mara’s gaze flicked to the clock. “My offer still stands. My home is closer than the city.”

“And I’m still good.” Adsila shrugged. “I have a date with a bottle of Skyy back home.”

“Adsila,” Mara’s voice was deadpan. “If alcohol is the only thing keeping you, I can promise I have plenty.”

“It’s not.” Adsila assured with a hesitant chuckle. “I just want to go home, get drunk again, and go to sleep in my own bed, no offense.”

Her friend chuckled. “None taken. But truth be told,” Mara started, beginning to adjust her contacts for the second time that night. It was a mystery to Adsila, how Mara could mess with her eyes as much as she did, yet there was never any redness, puffiness, or smudged makeup. “I’m starting to doubt that the train is coming at all.”

“Disagree.” Adsila said, gesturing to the side of the tracks where the train would appear from. “We heard it just a few minutes ago. It’s coming. It probably just broke down, or the conductor got the schedule wrong. It happens all the time.”

Mara rolled her eyes, blinking up at the lights and muttering something sharply under her breath. Adsila only caught the last two words; not coming.

She was itching to light another cigarette. Something about a burning, paper-encompassed nicotine stick slowly destroying her organs was comforting. She had always told her girlfriend-no, ex-girlfriend-that it was the way the cigarette felt between her fingers that made her fall in love. How could something so small and slim be the cause of death for millions?

Adsila’s hand twitched to pull the cardboard box from her bra when her gaze caught Mara’s, and she realized she was staring. “What?”

“Nothing.” Mara said, gray flicking over her again. Her gaze lingered on her throat for a split-second longer.“I just quite like the look of you.”

Adsila’s face felt hot. “What, are sobering-up women your type?”

“Would you believe me if I said yes?”

Adsila snorted a laugh. “No.”

Mara hummed. “A shame.”

Adsila rolled her eyes, crossing her arms over her chest and closing her eyes for the briefest of moments. She reawoke just as quickly, and Mara was closer than she had been, up next to her face. She jumped, leaning back slightly. “Mara-”

“There’s grime on your face.” She whispered, brushing the ice cube that was her thumb across her cheek. “May I?”

She blinked, and then shrugged. “Go for it.”

Mara smiled, a soft one wide enough she could just see the bottoms of her teeth. White bone cutting through painted-red flesh. She leaned forward, pinching the pad of her right thumb between her teeth, wetting the skin with spittle before brushing it with care across her cheekbone. An eerily intimate act.“So, do you have any roommates? I say this with no intent of offense, but you don’t really look like someone who can afford to live alone.”

Adsila snorted. “I don’t.” She leaned into her friend’s touch. “Live alone, I mean. I have roommates, four of them, they’re all just assholes.”

“Four is a lot.” Mara agreed, done with whatever she had been doing moments prior, and now just keeping a hand on her cheek. “I can imagine there would be some strife there.”

“They’re not assholes because it’s suffocating living in a tiny apartment with four college students.” Adsila groaned in a tone that sounded more like a child complaining that a grown woman talking to another woman her age. “They’re assholes because that’s just the kind of people they are. People who seem nice on paper but are actually pathetic excuses for human beings with a sense of loyalty more flimsy than a block of soaked cardboard.”

Mara sat with that for a moment. “I assume there was a falling out of some kind?”

Without her permission, the events of the night blinked back in a technicolor. The link of her arms through her roommates as madetheir way to their destination. The ear-splittingly loud music that could be heard from down the street. The warm, deliriousness of a drunken state, making the lists of mathematical formulas and scientific facts disappear into the backwaters of her mind. The soothing weight of porous paper and chopped tobacco leaf between painted nails. The burden of the bedroom doorknob in her hand, and how the metal bent to her will and whim when she twisted it open. The argument in which she was the only one in her corner. The biting cold against freckled skin, and the freezing of tears against cheeks.

Adsila sighed. The brick was back in the base of her throat, and her eyes had begun to burn. A single tear slipped from the corner of her right eye, which was quickly disposed of with a quick swipe across the cheek from her middle finger. “You could say that, yeah.”

If Mara had seen the betrayal of her tear ducts, she made no light to it.

Neither spoke for a stretch of time that felt like an eternity. And in that slow time, her mind was clearer than it had been in the hour since she had sat down. And with sobriety, came that familiar fuzzy warmth of exhaustion, clouding her thoughts like a plague. It was a mindless act, pulling the small cardboard box from its safe spot against her skin and out into the fluctuating night. She took one cigarette out, then a second, offering it to Mara, who was surprised, but took it from her. Adsila flicked her thumb against the spark wheel until a small flickering flame bloomed, its heat contagious. She beckoned Mara to lean down until their foreheads were nearly touching, and lit both cigarettes with one fire. Adsila pulled the cigarette from her lips, exhaling smoke as she stashed her flimsy box of death away once more. Mara scowled after her first puff, disappointment lining her brows. “God, these have gotten worse since I last had one.” Huffing a laugh, Adsila relaxed back against the bench, subconsciously, leaning against Mara, until her head was resting on her shoulder.

“Adsila,” Mara asked, and she found herself in love with the way her name sounded when it came from her voice. “Have you ever met someone like me before?”

She hummed. “Depends. What do you mean?”

Mara said nothing for a long while, electing to run the tips of her nail against the sleeves of the borrowed jacket. They were long enough that she could feel them through the protection of the leather shield from the cold. “Someone who lingers too close for too long, who you can’t keep your eyes off of. Who you feel naturally drawn to, study like a specimen under a microscope.”

Adsila contemplated, running through years of faint and vivid memories. Had she ever met someone like the mystery woman she had befriended? Someone so immediately fascinating and intoxicating? She didn’t know. She had a terrible tendency to find everyone fascinating and intoxicating, was Mara any different? The crickets were out now, filling the quiet with soft chirping. Finally, she shrugged, as best she could, with being so close to her friend. “I don’t think so, no.”

Mara frowned, clearly disappointed. “A tragedy, I guess.”

She raised a brow. “What, that my first was you?”

“No,” She sighed, deep in her chest. “That your first was me.” She sounded so sad it brought a crinkle to Adsila’s brow. And before she could question, Mara beat her to it. “Are you a lonely person?”

The five words hit her like a blow. And it was said with such a sympathetic kindness that the hurt swelled in the flesh of her lungs like an overfilled balloon. It begged for an answer. Adsila didn’t know or understand where the sudden vulnerability came from. It felt wrong, a cracking light bulb lodged in the heart of her windpipe. “Very lonely.”

Mara said in an almost-croon. “I thought so.”

Adsila laughed. “Is it that obvious?”

“Yes.” Mara said bluntly. “Your self-loathing is so clear to me that it breaks my heart, and that is quite the difficult task.” She drew a long breath from her cigarette, exhaling it slow so the smoke could dance for a moment in the air before disappearing. “The tell was the company you keep-or well, kept. I say this with respect, but the company one keeps tells a lot about them, a semi abbreviated story of who they are as people. And absolutely no one who loves herself would be driven to this point of utter internal oblivion because of others.”

Adsila pulled away sharply. Her cigarette dropped to the floor, dying off on its own. “Fucking excuse me?”

“How are you feeling right now?” Mara asked, watching her curiously. “And please, do be honest. Do I make you uncomfortable? Nervous?”

“Right now, yes.” She said with an agitated chuckle, gaze flicking around the room, a quick and desperate search for an out.

Mara nodded, as if that was the expected answer. “Do you want me to go?”

Her answer was automatic. “Yes.”

Mara frowned and tsked. “Adsila,” she chided gently. “I said to be truthful.”

“I am.” She snapped, standing from the bench. Heels clicked against concrete as she put a four step distance between her and her companion. “You said to be truthful, I am. It’s not my fault if you don’t like my answer.”

“Except you aren’t.” Mara countered, following her in standing, dropping her own burning porous paper stick to the ground. It was crushed beneath the heel of her boot. “Believe me when I say that I can tell when you are.”

“Bullshit.” The venom in her voice was biting and vicious, but equally a comfort and familiarity. She should’ve turned Mara away, or walked the two and a half hours back to the apartment. Probably should’ve had a nap in a Denny’s or a Waffle House and taken the morning train. Sobriety always made her too nice. Softened the jagged edges and bluntented the razors until she was an exhausted kindness. And kindness got people like her killed. “You don’t know me. A few five minute conversations and vaguely personal heart-to-hearts doesn’t make you a mind reader, nor does it really offer you any genuine information about the other person. You don’t know more about me now than you did-” She glanced back at the clock, and her eyes widened. The clock’s large hand clicked past the twelve marker, turning the time to a crisp and fresh 3:45 A.M.

Mara sighed in defeat, her shoulders dropping like stones in water. She muttered under her breath, and unlike the last time, Adsila heard her clearly.

Adsila said nothing as Mara turned her head up, eyes to the fluorescents as she lifted her hand up over her left eye. The tip of her nail scraped the top of her eye, pulling to the side until she could use the pads of her thumb and index finger to pull it from the corner of her eye. The action was repeated for the second, and when Mara’s gaze fixed back on her, a shot of cold careened the marrow of her spine.

What was once gray was now an all-consuming piercing silver, devoid of a pupil. What was once the white of the eye was now riddled in small streams of bright and angry red, like a thousand burst blood vessels, curled in small and twisting patterns from the iris down to where the socket’s waterline met eyeball.

It was not human. It was not what human eyeballs looked like.

“Mara.” Her voice shook as she took a step backwards. Then a second, a third and fourth. Every fiber and molecule screaming, beating on the walls in the confines of the meat prison they were trapped in, telling her to run. To hell with logic and reason, fight or flight had taken the reins and were begging her to go. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t turn tail and run, and she couldn’t look away. She didn’t understand how, but she just couldn’t. “Mara where’s the train?”

“Darling Adsila,” Mara’s sweet voice felt disjointed from the creature before her, as if it should belong to something else. An utter contrary. “The train isn’t coming.”

Adsila made it another half a step back before Mara appeared in front of her in a blink, grabbing her shaking body. One arm circled her waist to hold her back, naturally cold hands splayed against the natural heat of her bare back,the other taking a hold of her jaw. There was an unfamiliar firmness to her grip, yet she was still gentle when she tilted her head slightly to the right, and Mara’s head dropped to her leather-clad shoulder. Her nose brushed the beadwork dangling from her ears. To Adsila’s surprise, Mara kissed the skin of her neck, just above where her racing pulse beat in her bloodstream and layers of flesh. The proximity let her feel the erratic breathing of the strange creature holding her on a train station platform, and-

When Adsila was a child, she had found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and on the worse side of an animal’s ferality. Age had taken her ability to remember the finer details of the incident, to which her therapist would soothe her irritation over with the not-so helpful reminder that what the mind forgets, the body remembers. And while she could no longer recall if the dog’s fur was black or gray, if its eyes were brown or blue, she could remember the feeling of bone breaking surface on skin. She could remember what the bite of teeth felt like, as if she had experienced seconds prior.

It was bone-chillingly familiar, when Mara’s sharp teeth sunk into her throat like a lock into a key.

A million questions raced through her mind as she reflexively, instinctively, grabbed Mara’s shoulders to keep herself upright. How could Mara’s teeth be sharp enough to break skin so easily? How had she moved so close so fast? How had she known what was, and was not, truth? How could she feel the blood be drained from her veins? They piled up like unpaid bills, and if she spent a brief half-second longer on any one of them, a hundred more would come.

A million questions didn’t matter when she felt Mara’s muscles shudder like a woman starved. They turned to root in irrelevancy as blood loss fuzzed her brain until she couldn’t think a coherent thought. And they slipped through her memory like sand as her body went limp in the firm but gentle hold of the bloodthirsty stranger at the station.

Adsila’s eyes flicked shut as the warmth of unconsciousness drowned her.

-

Elena Greer (she/they) is an Irish-Shawnee lesbian from the northeast of Ohio, who writes fun, freaky little stories for Indigenous queer people such as herself. Their writing most often explores the complicated variety of human nature, as well as the intersections between queerness, and her reconnection with her Indigenous identity.

She can be found at their website elenagreerwrites.carrd.co/, as well as her Twitter at @greertragedy, and their words can be found in publishings from Atomic Carnival Books and Prismatica Press