a private moment

 

Fruitvale Station, wherein Dewey sat counting, breathing and blinking, was uncharacteristically quiet—impossibly quite. Never in the life of the public transport station had it experienced such serenity. Its gestation had been a six-month long construction project which generated a tremendous racket twenty-four hours a day—much to the annoyance of the neighborhood residents. Its birth was a huge extravaganza; speeches from state and local officials, mingled cheers and protests from the crowd, live music and exploding fireworks. Then, without the slightest chance at a normal childhood, the station was immediately put to work serving a million bitching commuters around the clock daily. It had been performing its job non-stop for nearly seventy-five years.

Nor had the station ever been so uninhabited. Gone was the ever present staff; the clerks and attendants with forced smiles, the overzealous security guards, the uninspired maintenance crew; there was not even a single janitor in sight—but then again that wasn't very unusual. However, the complete absence of transients, prostitutes and pharmaceutical vendors—or pharmies—was just downright eerie.

And if those millions of commuters were still complaining they were doing it somewhere else because they certainly weren't milling about Fruitvale Station any longer.

Everybody was simply gone; with the notable exception of Dewey James.