The train flew past, and May’s outstretched hand was positioned just so, that the fingertips were grazed by the rivets at the side of the train, but not struck clean off her hand. She might have imagined it, but it seemed to her that as the train hit all the other people, it paused for just a hair. A single tenth of a tick of the clock.

She heard the screams, and she bowed her head. Conscious of what she’d just done through her silence.

Disaster.

She opened her eyes, but she saw only darkness, and she wondered if she had died after all. She saw figures writ in onyx black against a black background, dressing themselves in roles. Again and again, on the stage, curtains closing, crashing together like waves, fragments flying in every direction, then backstage, figures dressing themselves in a new set of roles for another performance, then the performance, so fleeting compared to the preparation and what followed…

She felt an elemental sort of urgency as she minded the repetition, the drum-beat flow of images so big she had to abstract them in her head. In trying to define that elemental urgency, she reached for a comparison and found one in her mother, driving her, not demanding perfection, but needing it.

In that touchstone of reality, May found her way back to clarity and sense. To feeling nauseous and bewildered, numb and hypersensitive to the smell and taste of blood, the smell and taste of the train’s oil and engine. To touch, the scratchy feeling of blouse on skin, sweat coating her.

The sounds. People still screaming.

To get away, she had to get through. Between train cars—she had to step on a segment to get up and forward. Up to the platform.

Reaching hands tried to pat at her and check that she was okay. Used touch to assuage their own anxiety.

Dimly, she realized some of the blood droplets she was walking on were her mother.

Driven by the thought, she pulled away from the hands, ducking down, looked for her violin case, and found it lying on the platform. She ran up the stairs, stopped and hugged the side as people ran down, and escaped the ones who paused long enough to notice that the scratchy blouse had dots of crimson on it, each dot bleeding into fabric and spreading out into circles.

A man screamed, and it was a different sound than the other screams. They were reacting to something that had happened a minute ago. The man—the homeless man with a mop of dreads at the top of his head, he was screaming because of something that was happening now.

May winced at the sound, then winced again as her thoughts were briefly scattered. Onyx figures that weren’t figures, choosing roles in contradiction to one another.