The Subway Station

by Tim Jones-Yelvington

That evening I’d resolved to stay indoors, forgoing a party at Gerry’s, Gerry who was a friend of a friend. Alone, I savored a sauvignon. Glass followed glass, until, late in the evening, I felt a stirring, a quiver in my toes. I conjured Gerry’s thick fingers, the temperature of his breath, and my little piggies itched to curl. I consulted the clock – just past 12. Gerry was of a circle whose festivities often lasted into early morning. I imagined my late arrival, his sloppy embrace, an accidental touching of thighs, and set out.

At the subway station, I rode an escalator down deep, into darkness. Multihued advertisements bloomed from either wall, promising spectacles and red-letter discounts. Carnival creatures frolicked, velvet-skinned supermodels disrobed. As one escalator ended so began another, descending further, deeper still. Considering the tunnels, their length and girth, I understood why long ago, during a great war, they’d embraced aroused citizens who pressed together in sweat, seeking shelter from explosions.

I waited on the empty platform, watched a white paper bag flutter, soaked with grease, until the train clattered into position and its doors retracted.

“Stop!” I heard a shrill woman’s voice. “Pickpocket!”

A shadowed figure shot from a nearby car, clutching a black object. I launched my body, pried the object from his hands – a camera!

“Sir,” called the woman.

I saw her installed inside the train car, she a tourist in my city at an unusual hour, her expression entitled and her satchel engorged. How could I allow such a creature to capture my city on film?

As the train’s doors shuttered, I ran into a stairwell, the pickpocket following. This was a spiral staircase, and as I mounted its helix, I heard the pickpocket flank my backside. A terrified thrill rocked my stomach, and I wondered whether this was what it meant to be “given chase.”

I emerged into a tiny antechamber before a locked metal gate. Soon, the pickpocket was upon me. He struck my arm, and the camera clattered across the concrete. He handled my hip, I spun. I unbuckled him, pulled his pants to his ankles and saw his were the legs of a pony. I slapped and stroked his glossy haunch. I remembered a bareback ride during my adolescence, how I kicked the horse and felt it canter. The pickpocket mounted, and as his muscled flank slapped the backside of my thigh, I whinnied. Pick my pocket, pocket picker. Pocket my pick. The pickpocket stretched to grab the camera, and I heard its shutter’s release.

Several days later, I received via email a link from a strange address – the pickpocket’s photos, uploaded and albumed. I clicked, I looked. My hands squeezing the gate’s iron bars. The pony, poised to buck. I reached into my pants and remembered.

Tim Jones-Yelvington lives and writes in Chicago. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Sleepingfish, Annalemma and many others. His short fiction chapbook “Evan’s House and the Other Boys who Live There” is forthcoming in Spring 2011 in “They Could No Longer Contain Themselves,” a multi-author volume from Rose Metal Press. He contributes to the group blog Big Other and maintains his personal blog Ejaculations of a Perverse Adult. With Megan Milks, he co-hosts “Uncalled for Readings,” Chicago’s “mostly Queer, mostly prose” reading series. He is guest editing PANK in October as a Queer poetry and prose issue.

posted by Roxane Gay