Ghost by Ishbel Craig '23 Sweepers wear orange, neon-bright against the tunnel. They shuffle along the platform like clockwork. Each of them marking off passengers as they go, trading off bags and wipes for scanners as figures appear in the dark. There’s something rather poetic about it; dancers performing a waltz, or perhaps a swarm of bees fussing around a field.
Perhaps she exists only in this station, or maybe time is thin here. Worn like an old sweater until it frays. Perhaps she is the memory of a braver time, lost and confused. Hiding as a transfer even the transport officers forgot about. Maybe she is like the old man. Vivid only on the beach, a shell anywhere else. Only this moment is her beach; three in the morning on a platform deep underground and busking for lost tourists and drunk students and old men with nothing to lose.
It’s too hot underground, the station nearly empty at this early hour. Just the hunched shoulders of the man traveling to see the sun, his skin as weathered and cracked as the vinyl he sits on. A flicker of sequins trapped in his eye marked the return of a party running late. The old man’s watch ticks over to three a.m as a train pulls up with carriages glistening under flickering lights. The drunks cheer at the shining arrival, and again when someone dismounts. Welcoming this new arrival with open arms and waving the conductor off as they pull away. He watches the newcomer disentangle herself from the partygoers with admirable ease, then again when the sweepers descend to check her ticket. She sets up her keyboard near a closed concession stand with dead eyes and steady hands that speak of many a morning spent in this exact moment, unwinding cords and checking the locks on autopilot. Those wrinkles of hers are not like the old man’s. His speak of wide swathes of sand leading down to a crystal sea, of lessons learned and taught. Her’s a whisper of empty church halls and unanswered prayers. Lines carved into her face as punishment rather than reward. Sometimes they are nothing at all. She is the other constant in their small corner of the world. Arriving before the sun, playing past when the old man would board, disappearing without a trance. A true ghost. On the hard days, when the old man can’t smile at the youth or entertain their children, he can feel the presence of his Ma, hears her rasp old poison into his ear. ‘Child.’ She would say, ‘that thing is a monster.’ When the days are particularly hard, the woman does become the monster. The old man has never seen her shadow or heard her speak.
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