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  • Subway Rorschach
  • Neil Shea (bio)
Keywords

#VQRTrueStory, subway, New York City, Brooklyn, baby, mixed-race


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In the new city we carry our newborn son down the block and into the subway. His first journey, diving under rivers, piercing webs of pipes and wires, rattling past ghost stations and lunch boxes lost by the sandhogs a century ago. They say in new cities you are given grace—some time in which to believe anything, to dodge blame, to gather memories that years from now will fall like hail on unlucky relatives. Who knows? We're tired and the kid, this lump, warm and dense as dough, is getting heavy. While the car idles (and before he spits up) a woman speaks to his bobbling head and says, "Mixed-race babies always have that look." // Already we're going blind, growing hard. I don't hear anymore the advertisements lining the station walls, shouting about movies, apps, STDs. They tick by, blocks of color, bits of text, until somewhere on the G line I pause before this poster board. Where once the ads were stacked five or seven seasons deep, all narrative is stripped away, leaving fragments, a butterfly blend, my subway Rorschach. // Suddenly I'm thinking of a man I know who's walking the Silk Road with a pair of mules. Each dusk finds him entering a border town, or nearing some range of fabled mountains. Along the way he has encountered ancient wells that, over years, have choked with sand. Though he never said it, I know such details bring sadness. What notes he might have heard in their mouths, how clear were those holy waters! Eventually he'll ascend from the desert to face facts: The walled cities have all crumbled, the caravanserai have been turned into condos. Grain by grain go our stories. At my chest the boy flails a pale fist. His way of saying, Move along. [End Page 10]

Neil Shea

Neil Shea is a writer, filmmaker, and teacher. His work regularly appears in National Geographic, and he's a contributing editor to VQR and the American Scholar. He teaches at Sewanee, the University of the South, and Boston University.

Brooklyn, New York
@neilshea13
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