I board a train that sways and screeches through the tunnels beneath the city. Outside the train windows, light alternates with stretches of darkness. There’s no angry homeless man in my car, just a man and a woman across the aisle in the middle of a whispered argument, a toddler strapped into a stroller next to them. The toddler looks hot and exhausted and is half-heartedly chewing on a pale yellow blanket. He gazes at me as I make faces and try to get him to smile. I’m rewarded with a drooling grin. Children fascinate me, how they’re tiny little people who you can see literally learning how to walk or throw a ball or read. I can watch them play for hours. It’s not some deep-seated maternal instinct; I have no interest in being a parent, although God forbid you say that out loud if you’re a woman. I think children fascinate me because my own childhood was ruined by seeing my parents shot to death when I was ten. There’s no continuous, forward-moving narrative of my life as a kid. Instead I have fragments of memories, the good side-by-side with the bad. In one, I’m helping Dad plant black-eyed Susans in a sunny spot in our backyard. In the next, I’m sitting in the hall outside my bedroom, my lap full of blood. This is my childhood. It’s like having a precious vase that shattered and now all you have left are shards, but you still put those shards out on your hall table or whatever, this broken part of you on display. I look at the toddler gnawing on his blanket and hope he has a good life.

That’s when the toddler’s parents take their argument up a notch.

“—not the point,” the man is insisting to the woman. “That’s not the point at all. I’m working my ass off, for both of us, all three of us, and you want to complain about the laundry?”

The woman shakes her head, a weary denial. “That’s not true,” she says. “I’m not—”

“But you are,” the man says. He has a banker’s haircut and heavy eyebrows that make him look like he’s scowling. It’s like someone glued a pair of fuzzy caterpillars to his forehead. He’d be almost handsome if it weren’t for those eyebrows. That and the fact that he’s bitching at his wife. “You stay home all day with the baby,” he continues, pointing at the toddler in the stroller without looking at him. “Is it really that hard to wash all the laundry? I’m not trying to be an asshole here, I’m just asking.”