There are two bodies involved in an interaction that I wish to tell you about. The first body is moving frighteningly fast, it runs hot, metal kissing metal. Swoosh, swish, it is has the grace of a tin ribbon snipped up and then glued back together. It snaps around corners. People come to the fast body, walk right into its tenfold maws, to be then later spat out. Only the moisture in their breath having been digested.

The second body is a calamity. Think if you took every piece of plumbing right out of the wall of a two-floor Victorian shack, clapped them together and said, “Walk!” This body hauls itself past people and it appears to also be an unpredictably polarized magnet. Some eyes will be pulled straight to it, even from far distances, attracted by its uncanny gait. Those same eyes, then, will be pushed away and up to the sky, or a friend, when the body gets close. Some eyes dance all around the body: feet, hands, chest, hair, but a force keeps the focus from the face, as if it is a well of guilt none want a sup from. And still others will feel a net-zero effect, not an eye bat, not a pupil perturbed. These ones are usually up to their neck in tailed suits and carry a briefcase with the power to suck life from beautiful vistas.

There is a station in the south of Seattle that sits wet, like most stations tend to do during a cloudy day. Whether the rain causes the station to wet or the wetness drives forth a rain, that is anybody’s guess. But, there is a wet station, and it wonders on the arrival of a train. Perhaps a hot, metal-kissing-metal train that will provide a little reprieve from the chill of all these raindrops that have pit-patted inside its concrete.

Oh yes and there is a drumming now, like a monk hammering an electric bell to summon tiny electric fireflies. There are five drummings. Hooting around a corner comes a body, so frightening and fast, its countenance utterly uninterested by the forces with which it recons. Before anyone on the station has time to say, “Oh yes, here is the drumming, there is the hooting, and – ah yes – I see the train coming round yonder bend,” the train is upon the station. It’s mouth is open, patient and ready to gorge.

I step out of a door near the back, foot first, as is more common. A lady that sat next to me on the train explored the option of head-first, but unhappily tottered right off the other end of the platform. I continue in stride towards the gates at the other end of the station. It is the afternoon on a Saturday and I don’t expect to have to jostle with another soul to get there.

No one else is on the platform.

But then here comes one now, and I realize my eyes are owned by something other than the brain they are mounted to. I’m pulled towards staring at the body lumbering up the ramp.

It is a calamity of a body.

One leg, totally stiff, like driftwood had sprouted there instead of flesh and toes. Up he pulls it and down he drops it, and it just doesn’t cooperate. In his hand, he balances a pizza box, which slips at every step, only to somehow be caught again. His face is as hot as the train! And he starts hooting just like it too, hollering a more animal soundboard. There are only so many ways air can be pushed through flesh on flesh. I catch my eyes trying to look away – being cast away – from this desperate excuse for a well human, and tell them off for it. I said no to the eyes, that it was time to look. And here is what I saw.

I saw a frighteningly fast body, idle from its last sprint, cooling by a wet station. I saw it’s jaws wide open, they had been for some time, asking for any volunteers to enter. I saw a calamity strained to exhaustion, moving up what was barely an incline. And a third body, sitting, is what I also saw. It sat at the front of the train, a few buttons laid out before it. I saw the calamity begin to make good pace towards an open door, start to plan where it would sit, if there would be a comfortable seat, what pizza slice it would eat first. I saw a body, the one that sat at the front of the train, extend an arm, an arm of not wood not plastic, but flesh. An arm clearly in operable form. I saw the finger on that arm smoosh a button like it idly folding in a dull game of poker.

I saw a door close. I saw a door hiss as it closed, and I saw on one side a calamity, on the other side something fast. And after it all, I saw my own two feet continue on down that silly ramp, tumbling down in three great strides. But the body behind me must have left magnetic residue in its wake, for something in my head prodded me to turn and look back. I’d heard most of what I expected to see. Certain sounds had come forth from the calamity as those doors had unfairly cleaved him from its inside. Most of these sounds were derisive, unpleasant – filled with an anger that had festered under the weight of societal indifference. As the moment passed and the fast body got back to its hot metal engagement, so too had the cries from the body on the station settled. And when I turned and looked behind me, maybe to chance a peek at the addictive misfortune of this fellow, I found not a a bubbling body of red rage, waving a fist at the shadow of the lightning train. I saw just a man seated on a bench, a pizza box in his lap, and a slice of pizza already half inside a mouth.