The usual, hateful hoard of force-hugged bodies was wobbling its way in the tin can carriage on the green line of the Moscow Metropolitan. No Russian ever remembers the colour of the lines, just the names. Let's not give this industrial brutality a colour after all - it's nature's job to dictate colours - and we Muscovites don't really do nature anymore. Several faces hid from standing old women with heavy, woven bags behind cheap, lurid newspapers. Those who hadn't picked up a paper faked sleep. This, on top of everyone desperate to get out, made the carriage bristle with tension - much more electric than the charge fed into the tracks to hurtle the damn thing in the first place.
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An average Muscovite spends a total of five years on the Metro - a prison sentence for living in a devillish capital - fed to the people in elegant teaspoons of time just in case they start to notice the anti-public transport axe away at their lives.
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The roof of the wagon got speared. The magnificent crash knifed the train to death. A two-foot wide column of concrete fell into it. Stopped the train dead in one point two seconds. Bodies scraped against gravity for about point six of a second longer than that. The shoved humans at the back of the carriage compressed so tight. It was impossible to see who was wearing what. People clagged like a cubed car in a scrap yard.
Nobody died. So, it's not a very Russian story after all.
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I've finished my masters degree and now my writing feels like it has lost some of its defiance - nothing to rage against as yet. It'll come though - I sense the rumble of something rolling up the mountain.
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My brother, ten years younger than me, lives in Moscow. I beat the cunt down on kilos though and have more working hair-holes in my head. He lives down on the green line. He calls it the green line still. He might not for much longer of course. I'll give him one and a half months. That's the most time you can extend a tourist visa to in Russia with the right bribes.
Nobody lost their life on that train - no matter how much I hate that phrase I need to use it. Fuck me! How many living Muscovites need to be actually looking for a life before we stop using it.
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I want to write a novel. I have a million ideas - that's one idea for every two and a half metaphors. I want to build stories like metal insects - stick some chemical, poetic mush inside and clamp a couple of equal-ended, bandy metaphor slabs on it. Stab six literary legs on it. Kick its arse and see it trundle.
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I know life can be a ghost - I've seen it.
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I know my brother's not dead. No one was killed in the incident.
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I wrote this in the time it took the twenty-third man in the pile to stand up. That's about thirteen minutes.
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I need these fucking infernal numbers - they anchor me.
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Sleeping with clowns will continue in a few days time. About thirty nine hours.
