The phrase echoes softly in the car, a muffled call into the vastness of the tunnel: take a tock. Is anyone listening? The boy is not sad, though a quiet tension threads through the afternoon ride. The subway car is nearly empty, and a stray seat waits in the subdued light. A mother and child sit opposite, their presence forming a focal point for the narrator’s train of thoughts. The mother’s questions linger, stirring a doubt about whether a body holds only the self or something more — a different child than the one hoped to see. If faced with the same question, the narrator would offer a simple reply: I. That simple syllable becomes a shelter when doors rattle and the corridor hums with mechanical breath.
That is the answer given when doors are knocked upon, when privacy is breached, when a moment demands a name. I. The word is spoken by everyone, yet its owner remains elusive. Who am I, beneath the surface of this moment, beneath the breaths and the looks shared across the car?
The mother returns to the rhythm of daily life, glancing at her phone for a beat before resuming the exchange with the world beyond the glass. Plug Click, she asks in a whisper that barely negotiates the distance between strangers. Is anyone there? The boy continues to drift in his indifference, and a quiet smile passes between the two adults as they survey one another without speaking aloud.
There is a joke, gentle and reckless, spoken to ease the weight of the moment: there is no one here. The reply comes quickly, a light jest meant to deflate the fear of absence. Yet a warning carries in the tension of the wheels turning and the announcements crackling through the car: do not dismiss what a body could be, even a body that seems vacant.
The idea of an empty body haunts the narrator ever since the thought arose. It becomes a shadow that stretches across memories of an empty house, an empty room, an empty coffin, images that conjure stillness but never the sense of a life within. The boy appears to sense the strain and speaks with unexpected clarity: empty bodies pretend a silence that cannot be broken, the dead are, in their way, the most literal emptiness imaginable.
When the child voices this truth, the mother registers it with a sigh and a hint of frustration. Then the boy offers a simple explanation. He enjoys pretending to be dead, not for love or longing, but because death becomes a shield — a way to silence the knocks and questions that arise when someone seeks a response and finds none. The mother and the narrator exchange a pale smile, aware that fear has found a temporary home within them.
The boy insists that his silence is not a preference for emptiness but a strategy: he is dead so that no one will answer back, so that the room will stay a quiet harbor instead of a noisy court. The adults nod, their smiles thinning into a wary calm as the train slows to approach a station that does not belong to the narrator, a stop where fate diverges from intention. They step off the car anyway, carrying with them an unspoken awareness that some moments in life arrive unannounced and leave behind questions that echo long after the doors hiss shut.