Filed to Points

The train was rush-hour packed, the kind where you stop apologizing for touching strangers because there's no room left to be sorry in. I had one hand on the overhead bar. So did the guy next to me — tall, dressed like he'd wandered off a Marilyn Manson tour, and his fingernails were filed sharp to points. I noticed them because they were above my head, wrapped around the same bar as mine.

The train lurched to an unplanned stop.

He let go of the bar. His hand came down slow, the way things do right before they hurt you. I had one hand on the overhead bar. So did the guy next to me — tall, dressed like he'd wandered off a Marilyn Manson tour, and his fingernails were filed sharp to points. I noticed them because they were above my head, wrapped around the same bar as mine.

I didn't feel pain so much as pressure, and then nothing. No blood I could see, no mirror to check, and this was long enough ago that a phone with a camera wasn't a thing you carried in your pocket. I had no way to know what my face looked like. No way to know where those nails had been, either.

I rode the rest of the way home not knowing. Got off, transferred to the Metro North, and dug through my briefcase looking for anything that might pass for first aid. All I found was a tube of Anbesol — toothache gel, the numbing kind. I rubbed it across the side of my face anyway, figuring numb and vaguely antiseptic-smelling was better than nothing.

The woman in the seat next to me watched the whole thing like she was witnessing a car accident in real time. She couldn't look away, but didn't offer to help either.

In that moment I had no idea if I was cut, scratched, or just badly startled. No mirror, no explanation, nothing to go on but a tube of Anbesol and the look on a stranger's face.

That's the version of horror I trust more than blood on the page. Not the wound itself. The not knowing what the wound is. A reader handed a full account — he cut me, here's how deep, here's what happened next — has nothing left to do but read. A reader handed silence, missing information, and a man rubbing toothache gel on his own face has to sit in the same uncertainty I did on that train.

It's the gap I try to leave open in the darker chapters of The Revenant Strain — a voicemail that cuts off, a log entry with no follow-up, a name that stops appearing in later documents without explanation. Nobody in the story is going to turn around and tell the reader what happened. They're going to have to do what I did on that train: sit with it, unconfirmed, and reach for whatever's in the bag.