It wasn’t the fact that he was working all day, going door-to-door with catalogs buried under his arm. It wasn’t the fact that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it just turned 7pm. It wasn’t even the fact that no bus was willing to pick him up for the next hour due to inclement weather.

It was the fact that he found himself back here in the underbelly of this city. The collective sweat, breath, and human heft all amalgamating into a stench that didn’t linger—it clung. Clung like a damp cloth to blistering skin, like a bad slick coating your throat, layer after layer until it solidifies, suffocates. Mihail loathed it with every ounce of his being, and he hated these subway platforms for it.

He didn’t mean to let his eyes wander, but having his head hung down made him all the more able. Just barely protruding from the rail track, covered in the same slick and soot on every surface of the tunnels, he could make it out. Qualitatively, it was a rat, though it was a generous label given its condition. 

Matted, slick fur shielded most of the gore, perm-pressed against the metal beam, three-times the length of what it should’ve been capable of. Each groove across its pelt was an unpopped joint, a snapped bone, a jut in places that shouldn’t be cut. A dried-intestine scored the outer edges of its body to the sides of the beam. Teeth yellowed, then blackened. And God, he was pretty damn sure that an eye was still intact. Every composite material was right there, and you could almost make it a rat again if you peeled and molded it just right.

As more people flooded the platform, the more Mihail found himself itching. His eyes darted from each new person who stepped into his field of view. God willing, only two more minutes until the train came. He stood about five feet from the platform’s edge. Sweat coated the inside of his shirt collar, clinging to him as the stench of bodies, pushing and piling their way into this space, his space, unabashedly, fragrantly flagrant. Taking note of every new character entering his peripheral, his eyes always returned to the tracks and the planate corpse, fists planted firmly against his sides.

The rat, God, could he even call it that? All the right pieces were right there, but it was missing something. All the right pieces were spatially close, but what’s a life if they can’t work in unison? All the right pieces were identifiably, quantitatively present, but the heart was gone.

Mihail found that in trying to step back, he couldn’t move. Maybe there was something slick against his shoe—grease or vomit or some animal shit—that kept him stuck to this spot. Or maybe it was the bodies crowding in closer, keeping him fixed. Every part of this subway clung to him, just as it clung to the hot metal tracks. Every body, every being, every sweating, bleeding, dying creature on this platform moved in perfect exhaustive motion as one single entity—an entity that would not let Mihail go.

And how could he not feel his own bones contort, crack and bend pliably so beneath the leathery tendons and tissue. How could he not listen as his own organs squelched and popped, vessel by vessel, and how everything was now moving inside, twisting and churning in an orbital motion, contained only by his thin, waning membrane—all of those parts inside his, designed to make up him. A him to make up a resounding them, and a them to make up a we, screaming, then silent.

When Mihail opened his eyes, he was no longer looking down, but up, with his one eye angled high enough to see the unperturbed faces of the city, the stench, and my God, how it clung. One by one, the heat waxed itself across the pelt, the cartilage, the dried flesh, the fresh slick—they were all his, but they were not him. 

And it was loud, louder than a chorus of locusts or a wave crashing against a cliffside. And my God, it wouldn’t stop. Not a single piece of him could move, clung to that beam as every bit he had rung in discordant glee. The light grew brighter and brighter, and yet nothing. He could not command a single part to move, not because of this state, but because there wasn’t a him anymore. He could only witness, watch, then wait. A twitch, a spasm, a jolt, and then he was back on the platform.

The train doors hissed open, and Mihail’s legs fell forward, finding their way to an open seat. His hands rested the bag on his lap, as his spine slumped forward, and his head leaned back against the wall. As more bodies piled in, so too did the stench follow, but Mihail couldn’t even recognize its cling. All he could perceive was 32 tons of solid metal swallowing every part he had whole. All he wanted was to just make it home in all pieces. All he could do now was let his body sprawl.