Whispers in Car 13
On the last train of every night, the city exhales through its subway vents and the car doors sigh closed like old suitcases. The line hums with fatigue, and Car 13—streaked with a pale rain of fluorescent light—seems to hold its breath a moment longer than the rest.
The narrator, a night-shift cleaner who keeps the schedule by fear more than by clock, boards with a bag of rags and a stubborn hope that tonight will pass quietly. The carriage smells of cold metal and old coins, a perfume of missed stops and half-remembered conversations. As the doors slide shut, the train stutters, and the world tilts toward a corridor of damp black—where the seams between the present and the past begin to fray.
“We never left the rails,” a voice whispers from the seat beside him, barely audible yet insistently urgent.
He notes the anomalies with the careful precision of a clerk: a seat that remains damp despite the heater, a handle that weeps with a cold sweat, a ticket stub that rewrites its date to shades of yesterday.
- A muffled chorus that travels along the ceiling panels, louder when the tunnel narrows
- Feet that shuffle but do not belong to any passenger pacing the aisle
- A map on the wall that redraws itself, showing stations no one remembers
Car 13 becomes a tiny theater of phantoms: a conductor with a missing badge counting in the dark, a mother with a child who vanishes when the doors hiss shut, a man who leans against the window and sees a future he never had in life. They pass through him like a wind that refuses to leave a window cracked open—the kind of wind that steals warmth and leaves gravity behind.
Rather than scream, the narrator writes. He documents the whispers as if they were a case file, hoping to anchor them to the page long enough to watch them loosen their grip. The phantoms tell stories in fragments—glimpses of lives lost to the tunnel’s appetite, promises made on steam, and farewells measured in seconds.
“Tell our story,” the whispers plead, “before the city forgets how we sounded in the dark.”
When the train finally rises toward the street lamps, the car’s chill softens. The narrator steps off into the dawn with a notebook heavier than it began, aware that some corridors never end, only pause to listen. In Car 13, a chorus remains—an echo that belongs to the line, to the city, and to anyone who chooses to listen when the whistle blows again.