One Last Stop

by Casey McQuiston

She can’t believe a tall butch subway angel saw her crying into her coffee tits.

Nobody who’s lived in New York for more than a few months understands why a girl would actually like the subway. They don’t get the novelty of walking underground and popping back up across the city, the comfort of knowing that, even if you hit an hour delay or an indecent exposure, you solved the city’s biggest logic puzzle. Belonging in the rush, locking eyes with another horrified passenger when a mariachi band steps on. On the subway, she’s actually a New Yorker. It is, of course, still terrible.

If she times it right, she can catch a train with Jane every single day. And so, in her first month in the apartment on the corner of Flatbush and Parkside above the Popeyes, August learns that the Q is a time, a place, and a person.

“Does it ever, like … I don’t know. Make you lonely? To love somebody who can’t meet you there?” She regrets it immediately, but Annie laughs. “Sometimes. But, you know, that feeling? When you wake up in the morning and you have somebody to think about? Somewhere for hope to go? It’s good. Even when it’s bad, it’s good.”

Jane laughs, which is rocketing straight up August’s list of favorite sounds in the universe. She’s gonna trap it in a shell like a sea witch. It’s fine.

in New York, everyone ends up worn down by the MTA and tourists and rent prices. Everybody’s seen it all. But that also means, sometimes, everyone is the smallest nudge away from delirium

That’s the way it happens on the subway—you lock eyes with someone, you imagine a life from one stop to the next, and you go back to your day as if the person you loved in between doesn’t exist anywhere but on that train. As if they never could be anywhere else.

occasionally, it’s an old train, burnt orange seats with FUCK REAGAN scrawled down the side in faded marker.

a homemade cross-stitch that says BIG DICK ENERGY IS GENDER NEUTRAL.

I did Cleveland for a couple of weeks, that was a nightmare.

The music starts welling up with soft strings and twinkly synth triangle, a few drum beats, and then Annie snaps her eyes forward to the crowd and mouths, “Give it to me.” It’s “Candy” by Mandy Moore, and the crowd has about one second to react before she throws her robe off to reveal a bra and miniskirt made entirely out of candy hearts.