Inside This Concrete Fish Tank
by Ambre Bourdier




Despite the dandelion seeds, some wishes are not meant to come true. I watched a little boy on the metro pluck his eyelashes and beg each one to turn him into a tiger. Meanwhile, the woman who sits across stares through yet another graffiti stained window and realizes—the insides of our bodies are always painted red. Simultaneously, a daughter holds the smooth hand of her grandmother and presses down on a vein, bouncing up and down like a nervous snake. Behind the two stands a pessimistic young man, leaning his earlobe against the cool window of the metro door. As a train noisily passes by in the other direction he leaps at the sight of a bearded man who doesn’t see him. Instead he is concentrated on repeating the bewildering line that is imprinted on the surface of his brain: Un cheveu poursuivi par deux planètes.

A little girl stands a few feet away looking up, distracted by some green paint clumping the frizzy hairs under the man’s beard. At a right angle from the girl a businesswoman remembers the mathematical equation that had troubled her the night before: fear = thinking + time. Two train cars away, a divorced man retraces the outline on the inside of his wrists along which a transitory woman had once drawn a path in a dark green pen. Hands firmly gripping the metro pole, a grieving old man’s eye twitches like the 332nd tick of a seizing clock. Suddenly, in a corner, a boy with dark hair looks up from his book and wonders if perhaps it is just an illusion that you see farther into the forest when the leaves fall from the trees. His older brother leaning sleepily against him winces as he reaches down into his pocket and pricks the skin of his chewed up fingers with the corner of his metro ticket. A one-eyed girl, whose father once read her Sleeping Beauty night after night, wishes she too were pricked. This girl, perhaps I knew her once before, but now we are two human blurs, contemplative ghosts missing each other every day as our trains rush in different directions.

At the other end of the train, the conductor, condemned to the incessant soot-covered nocturnal life of the metro, stares through particles of misery. Restlessness pours from every crack into his mustard colored cabin, leaving him numb. His head falling back he closes his eyes but still feels the flickering lights, fireflies trapped in dirty glass tubes. Turning his head towards God he asks, “what are we fighting for?” but he shrinks into a dust bunny and hops away. The man’s eyes flutter open just as a dandelion seed collides against the windshield in a sign of defeat.