a/n: Updates will be considerably slower these next few months. I'm trying to write a novel for my Senior Project, which is currently taking up all my time and attention... Just a short little fic-let I thought up on my way home from work... Review, please!

Chapter Eight: “Train 211 to Oxford”

Xenophobia – Fear of the unknown

“Something’s come aboard…”

She mumbled through chapped lips, barely causing a stir in the cramped cabin filled with far too many people coming home from work or just looking for a dry place to wait out the storm that pounded mercilessly against the metal roof and splattered the three-inch thick, grime-encrusted window in a fine spray.

A college student- or perhaps an over-zealous high schooler- twirled a purple highlighter between his nimble fingers, a trick he had taught himself because he had too much free time in class and not enough life experience to ponder about the meaning of it all.

“Something’s…”

Turning in her seat, she pressed her hand against the window closest to her, through which one could barely make out a gloomy cityscape speeding by through the murk of rain clouds and smog. Her forehead fell against the Plexiglas heavily and as if her neck could no longer support the weight.

The woman to her right looked up with shifty gray eyes that seemed reluctant to move from the tabloid paper she clutched in her neatly manicured hands. “Farah Fawcett Loses 10-year Battle with Cancer” the headline exclaimed in piss-yellow block letters. Upon seeing the woman with her face pressed to the glass, her lips just inches from the smear of some past transient’s sweaty fingers, the woman with the tabloid let her eyes fall back to the article she was bent on absorbing, letter by letter: “How I Lost 500 Pounds Without Surgery: One Woman’s Storey.” She didn’t care enough to notice “story” was misspelled.

The highlighter in the young man’s hand made another circuit of his graceful fingers. He looked up suddenly from his book, “The Satanic Verses,” his eyes searching the ceiling and the metal coverings over the light fixtures. His lips moved quickly and silently. The city passed and his attention shifted to his book once more, a satisfied grin touched his lips as he took the highlighter to a page, running a thick, purple line that stained the tea-coloured paper.

“Can you feel something?” The woman asked her seatmate, who shook her head with a bounce of her coiffed, russet, curls and shifted uncomfortably in her seat, the plastic creaking beneath her.

“Something… on the train…”

The woman with the magazine “hmm-ed” in the back of her throat, not really listening because, frankly, it wasn’t worth her time or valuable attention. She scratched at a red patch on her left ear absently with a forefinger.

With a screech of metal on metal, the train rocketed into a tunnel, protected for the time being from the rain outside by layer upon layer of carefully poured concrete.

The boy with the highlighter paused in his reading and looked up again just as the fluorescents flickered, then blinked off all at once, throwing the cabin in darkness. Besides the click of a highlighter as its plastic cap was replaced tightly and an irritated sigh and flutter of low-grade paper as a magazine was shut, no one stirred, but a soft curse was uttered from one of the many mouths, “bugger…”

In the darkness, the woman kept her face against the window, watching the gray stone fly by her very eyes like the hash marks from builders’ tools were feathers and the rock had a mind of its own, her fingers tapping an incessant and unknown code against the frozen glass.

Another great wail and the train shot forth into the light once again. No one seemed to notice that the woman was gone.