Chris Vola
Porn With Condoms
At almost three in the afternoon the subway platform beneath West 66th Street was slathered in the mid-spring drizzle that had been dumping on the city at an incessant clip for days, painting everything shades of slop-brown and gray. Marnie sat on a doodle-scarred wooden bench, waiting for the 1 train to take her home, not paying attention to the slick plastic containers leaking genetically modified dregs and mold and sliding, on an unfelt breeze, dangerously close to her quasi-military boots – this was when she was still going for an “activism with an edge” look – the vinegar-mouthed MTA employee holding a mop and not doing anything with it and staring at her, the ubiquitous tired-ass old folks milling and slouching and wondering. She re-read the text I’d sent her, tried to suppress the start of what would become a full-blown smile, dropped her phone in her tote bag and watched it land alongside her flats and the intentionally chosen manila folder that she’d brought to the interview, a receptacle as bland as the résumés and CVs contained within it, the doctored truths she hoped she would no longer have to rely on, at least for a little while. She thought about tossing the folder across the tracks, letting the papers drift, precipitate, get crushed by the trains or chewed and shaped and used for structural support in one of Manhattan’s abundant underground rat kingdoms, but she remembered the color-coded recycling bins in her building’s lobby. She pulled the hood of her raincoat over her frizz-damp hair, closed her eyes and waited for the rumble and hiss of transit that now sounded like the start of a real transition.