SHE’D CHANGED HER mind when the rain started. Usually Shelley walked everywhere—even in the dead of night, even in the rain, even if her swollen hip was causing its trouble—but when her long white hair had grown heavy with water, she’d staggered into the subway’s steamy heat and shuffled into a corner to wait for the train home.
There were only two other people on the platform at Lexington: a middle-aged white man with a weasel’s mustache and a nervous comb-over, and a young black man in a sleeveless Guardian Angels T-shirt. He had enormous sunglasses stuck in his hair, and tipped them at Shelley like a cap as she sank onto a bench.
She tucked herself away behind her big coat and spectacles, feeling brittle and old as she watched the litter dance in a whirlpool of wind. After a minute or so the rusting spray-painted train rattled into the station, howling through the dark with electric flashes that lit the graffitied walls like the swooping beams of a lighthouse.
As it screamed to a stop Shelley had a sense of time shifting around her. The train seemed somehow larger than normal, and heavier—as though it were pulling at her with some gravitational strength.
Wings fluttered as she stepped unsteadily through the doors, and two crows hopped onto the waste bin behind her.
She held on to the door, looking for a seat, but they were full of sharp-lapped stockbrokers and youths in open, studded jackets. One spike-haired boy had an enormous boom box between his knees, the speakers shaking with a thrashing sound. The carriage tasted rat-fur sweet, and it felt dangerous and sharp.
When the boy turned the box’s volume even higher and started banging on the windows with his studded gloves, Shelley wondered whether she should have gotten a cab instead. She turned to go.
But as she stepped from the train onto the platform, her hair lifted in a gust of wind.
And caught between the closing doors.
“Oh!” she cried, her head snapping backward. “Oh my! Help! Help!”
The man in the Guardian Angels shirt rushed over to her. “It’s all right, ma’am!” he shouted. “I’ve got you! Just hold on to me—”
The train began to move. Shelley stumbled into his arms.
“Help! My hair! My hair!”
People inside had seen what was happening and were pulling on the doors as the car wobbled into motion.
“Help!”
The boy had dropped his boom box and was heaving at the space beside Shelley’s hair, trying to push it through to the other side as his friend pulled frantically on the emergency stop.
As the train picked up pace the Guardian Angel lifted Shelley from the ground, running with her in his arms as she screamed and the people inside battered the doors: then the vehicle flew back into the dark, dripping tunnel and Shelley was torn from the Angel’s grip. He knelt, looking at the blood on his hands as terror poured into his stomach and the sound of wings echoed on the wet tiles behind him.
A third crow had appeared. Litter swirled around the birds as they watched, the electric light shining in their eyes.