Angels Under Glass
an excerpt

The trains. They were useless, and they were filthy. Inen, who complained daily about how much he hated it and yet never did anything to stop taking them, swore they were stuck together with an unholy mix of graffiti, chewing gum, and dirt. He remembered seeing grainy photographs of the very same trains from newspaper clippings from the 70s, when they were still shining metal and spotless interiors. The trains now bore no resemblance and actually, he had to admit that he was surprised that such a good idea had gone to pot so easily; the vandals had migrated towards the public transportation vehicles seemingly out of sheer spite, because they’d already destroyed the sidewalks and billboards in the city. He’d thought he had seen the worst of it in the downtown. That was where the vandlism was worst, all things considered, because even the road was liberally graffitied with the logos of popular clothing companies or rude words. Employment in downtown Londory was not a pleasant experience. The ironic thing was that nobody even bothered to stop the vandals from defacing property anymore, probably because they didn’t want to make the effort, and so it was common to see someone spray painting their opinions onto a building right in the middle of thirty or forty businesspeople. Even they, however, had begun to approach the trains and their enclosed interiors.

The latest thing among the vandals, Inen soon realized, was to scratch up the windows and door frames. He suspected one particularly grimy homeless man-- ‘CJ’, he apparently went by-- to have vandalised every train in Londory that way. It made it hard to see out the windows sometimes. The rest of the graffiti was occasionally indifferently cleaned, but the result was that the entire wall looked smeared, and most of the carriages were extensively vandalised inside. To his disgust, people even left their fast food on the trains and it looked like it was never cleaned up. He had seen hamburgers and milkshakes quashed into the floor, smelling rank and foul. But hey, at least if he went for a skid on someone’s hamburger, he’d be moving forwards, which was more than he could say for the trains themselves. As far as transportation in Londory went, however, they were the best any of the cityfolk could ask for, because the congestion on the highways was awful and stemmed from everyone wishing to avoid a trip by train at any costs. He suspected that even if the trains weren’t in a constant state of decay the traffic jams would still exist if not purely because people preferred the privacy of their own cars to public transport, where the chance of sitting down on a half-eaten, molding fastfood product was a very high one. He didn’t even understand why it was that the railcars garnered so much attention; what warranted so much destruction to them. They were meant to be helpful to the environment.

Maybe that was why.

“I hate it in here,” he muttered darkly, looking incredibly moody. He had his arms crossed disdainfully across his chest, garbed in a heavy grey woolen coat with large black buttons that were very close to falling off. “It’s disgusting.”

Beside him sat a young man with fair hair and a pair of reading glasses, which were perched on his nose, which was buried in a book, and this was who Inen was complaining to, though he was getting little in way of a response. As far as he was concerned, that book was a load of crock and boring as well but apparently also held more interest to his companion than he himself did, and that was a great deal offensive to someone in as foul a mood as he currently was. He scoffed, trying to resist the temptation to give his companion a sharp kick in the shin. The boy eventually gave a sigh and angled his eyes up, grinning slightly when he saw the way the redhead’s lips twisted like an angry child’s.

“If you hate it so much, why don’t you just not take the train? Or maybe you could walk every now and again, or drive-- carpool with someone, even,” he said chidingly, and raised an eyebrow. “There’s no rule that states you have to take the train with me everywhere I go.”

Inen toed a discarded fast food wrapped with one of his scuffed up boots, slumping in his seat as he did so. He felt that Jeremy was treating him like a child whenever the boy started talking to him in that ever patient tone of his, despite Inen himself being several years Jeremy’s senior. They had an odd relationship to begin with, and as was usual for him, he was treated as being the youngest when he indeed was not. That was usually how it went. “You’d get hit by a car the minute I left you alone,” he whined, “and then everyone and their mother would feel the need to bitch at me for it.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Jeremy said tactfully. He closed his book and kept his page with a finger between the yellowing pages. Regarding his friend with a calculating gaze, the boy unconsciously traced the gilt lettering on the front cover of his novel, which read ‘They’re Out There’. The title was sufficiently paranoid enough to awaken a slight curiosity in Inen, though really, the redhead had a vague enough idea of what the book was about. He had known Jeremy for months going on years now, and the boy had changed less than anyone he had ever known. Always composed, always logical; that was Jeremy, and Jeremy was always with a book in his hand. Eventually, a person had to come to tell what those books were about without even asking, because it would be too ironic not to know after so many weeks, and what Inen suspected Jeremy was reading was either a book about aliens-- because that was the first thought the title inspired-- or a book about angels. “I’d get off the train, go to the store, get back on the train, and go home,” Jeremy continued, sounding less and less intrigued by the conversation with every word to come from his mouth.

He was in one of his odd little moods; with a serious drawn line of a mouth and some sparkling dry humour in his eyes, watching Inen for any sign of taking him seriously. The redhead picked at his fraying coat pocket, noting absently that there was a hole in it near the seam, and he’d have to fix that... He pressed the fabric together as if it would do anything to mend the tear and replied flatly, “I’m sure. Which is why you didn’t bring any money and we’re not even on the right train?”