M Train

Alexandra Khalimonova M Train

Taking the M to Queens I watch hands grab at overhead poles in the tungsten light. Tired hands, tough hands, hands made of folds. Nails you want to cut, knuckles you want to run your fingers over like a child brushing the ribs of a park fence. She was making the plastic squeal, shoving the straw out from the side of a juice box. Her hands were smooth, and they were brown, and I sat thinking of the brown of chestnuts, of chestnuts nesting in the yellow grass of that ugly garden. I sat remembering my little torso hunched over my bent knees, boots sinking into the soft dirt, filling the same bucket we used to wash the car. The sound of them dropping and pooling at the bottom like sinking coins, never to be seen again, through the slit of a parking meter. When the bucket was too heavy for even my brother to lift, we filled the front pockets of our hoodies. If one slipped out we quickly retrieved it, stuffed it in a different pocket, as though they were something close to precious, treasures not be lost track of, but in truth there was nothing more terrible. Our mother tried her best, but she cooked for the rats. I saw it then, on the overhead pole. There on

the middle finger of her closed fist, a jewel the colour of a library lampshade. A green that lasts and that could last forever. I looked at her hands and not much else. I looked at it like a curse while the train shook us to sleep. There were loose sounds from all around us, we hit shoulders like bottles on the backseat. At Whitestone she got off, and the high school kids ran in, smelling like basketball. Their sneakers were enormous and I can tell you the color of their chewing gum. Blue, mostly. I am still thinking about the curse and the garden and all the places I could’ve left it. When my brother and I divided mum’s things, all he wanted was the furniture. He has a house in Clearview, and it rings when you walk. I got the weepy stuff: the albums, the smelly scarves, the jewelry. I took it off to shower but swam with it at Coney, letting the light play with it like the green was also part of the water. What it must’ve felt like to pick that up in the sand, next to incomplete cigarettes and screwed cans. To hold it for the first time in your hands. I am thinking about the rightful order of feelings: guilt first, sadness later. I am thinking about that day: the thunderstorm that came out of a brilliant St Martin’s Summer. The beet salad that I needed Russian to buy at Brighton Beach. The awful bellies of the men who smoked at the beige line where the wet sand meets the dry. I can nearly find the humor in this, but I just can’t. I know I could’ve found her lost ring if only I tried to.