Empty Platform

The subway platform is empty, posters, the occasional bench a fire extinguisher in a locked box, over-stuffed trash receptacles, the usual graffiti. No people, the strangers you travel with, all those commuting shadows that you hurry by - an absent factor that keeps you looking over your shoulder. You hear distant movement and chatter, of people on other adjacent platforms, hear the rumble of a train approaching, Normality is over there. Here there is a lack of such sounds, loudly a void shouts through, an empty bottle of vodka rolling toward you. It's not late or early, yet the emptiness reverberates, the tunnel whistles, as air is pushed along it, but it is the vacancy of footfalls, that spooks you most, that and the death rattle of the rails.