The Morning Train

By Farhat Zareen

The alarm went off at 5:47, which was not a time anyone chose deliberately. It was a time that happened to you when your commute required two buses and a train and you had learned, the hard way, that the 6:15 was the difference between a seat and standing for forty-seven minutes.

Clara had been making this journey for three years. She knew the faces. The woman who knitted aggressively, as though the scarf had personally offended her. The man who fell asleep exactly four minutes after departure and woke exactly three minutes before arrival, never missing his stop. The teenager who cried on Tuesdays and was fine on Thursdays, and whom Clara had never spoken to but thought about more than was reasonable.

She sat in her usual spot, third row from the back, window seat. The window had a scratch that looked like a lightning bolt. She had named it Alice.

"Alice," she said, not out loud, because speaking to windows was the kind of thing that got you moved to a different carriage. "What are we doing today?"

Alice did not answer. Alice was a scratch on a window.

The train moved through suburbs that blurred into each other, each station announcing itself with the same recorded voice that had been announcing itself for longer than Clara had been alive. She watched a woman run for the doors and miss them by three seconds. The woman's expression was not anger or frustration. It was the particular blankness of someone who had missed too many things to be surprised by it anymore.

Clara understood that face.

She had missed things. A promotion she had wanted. A relationship she had ended before it had properly begun, because ending things early felt safer than being left. A phone call to her mother last Tuesday, which she had postponed to Wednesday, and then Thursday, and now it was Friday and she had not called and her mother had not called either, and they were both waiting for something neither of them knew how to start.

The train arrived. Clara stepped onto the platform and joined the current of bodies moving toward exits and escalators and the rest of their ordinary, unremarkable days.

She took out her phone.

She called her mother.

It rang three times.

"Hello?" Her mother's voice was exactly the same as it had been last week, and the week before, and the week before that.

"Hi, Mum," Clara said. "I'm on my way to work. I thought I'd call."

A pause. Then: "I'm glad you did."

The train behind her pulled away. She did not watch it go. She was already walking forward, toward the exit, toward the day, toward the small and unremarkable act of showing up for someone before it was too late.