The morning was bitter, bleak, and brisk, harking back to the mornings of my childhood up in old Round Top.  Mornings where Ma would fix us steak and eggs, a meal that you were grateful to be served but cautious of its meaning.  Fa always said she got it from the war, feeding the troops a filling meal when they knew the day was a doozy ahead of them.  After indulging ourselves the first few times she prepared it, often believing steak and eggs to be the best meal Ma ever cooked, we soon learned to dread that tasty, meaty scent snaking its way around the house and into our bedroom, like a ghost haunting its victim.  But on this morning there would be no steak and eggs.  As I boarded the subway I thought about Ma’s steak and eggs one last time, and then, with every sense of reality held in check, I entered through the square, metal archway and took my seat. 
There were not many others in the car at this miserable time in the morning, and so I felt comfortable enough to close my eyes.  Life was nefarious at the time, or so I thought.  To think that I assumed I had fought off my fair amount of dangers, swooping in like phantoms in the night.  But a mere mirage these phantoms were, when compared to the nightmarish phantasms and specters that visited the realities of others.       
Slowly my eyes opened.  The cabin of the subway was blandly smooth, flickering lights created grotesque shadows that cascaded down the sides of the car.  I looked up to see that the man sitting across from me was holding a cigar to his lips.  He had long, graying hair with little white chips of what looked like paint hanging to his locks.  His face seemed to wrinkle even more as he moved and his eyes resembled a faded blue, almost as if they had been left out in the sun for too long.  He had recently been released from the Institution; I recall reading about him in the paper.   I think his wife had committed suicide.  She shot one bullet into the ceiling as a test and he yelled across the house, “Honey, what’s wrong?” Another bullet was shot within seconds and he found her dead on the floor of their bedroom.  That’s when he started eating the paint off the wall, the old acrylic lead slowly driving him mad, fitting that his name was Nero.  Institutionalized for years, his children shut the door on him, deeming it fit to mourn the loss of their mother without him.  It must be years since the last time he even saw his children.  I wonder if the ceiling still leaks in their bedroom. 
Moving my field of view over, I recognized that the teenage girl sitting next to the old man was one of my neighbors.  She bore bruises and cuts on her face and I knew that her father beat her, but I never knew it was to this extent.  I had seen it one day when I was pruning my chrysanthemums, her father’s fist held high in the air as he brought it down over her fragile face in a ferocious frenzy.  The circumstances of why he beat her so horridly I cannot be sure, although I do remember seeing a bottle of Heineken in her father’s other hand.  Her clothes were raggedy and looked to be outgrown.  I knew they didn’t have much money as the mother was dead, breast cancer I think it was, and her father was known to blow his weekly construction paycheck in one night on liquor.
Casting my vision over to the right, I noticed a school boy no more than the age of 18 slumped down in his seat.  Where had I seen him before?  Oh yes, during my time of detention I had witnessed this poor fellow.  I remember he shot his best friend, for certain he was high at the time but his friend did owe him a payment, marijuana I think it was.  Put the bullet right through his chest and he could not run.  He bled out in a vacant lot, the one in the summer where they used to smoke.  Jones I believe was his name, yes his mother taught me English in junior high.  When people asked him about the incident later he would use the most rigorous of detail, describing Jones’ flesh as “exploding” from his chest and his blood as “beautiful”.  For sure his head was stuck in the clouds, but I don’t think it ever rained.     
To my immediate right I noticed a classmate of mine from high school, Anthony was his name.  Man had he been through a lot.  I can still recall the day when his father left him and his mother, it was right around the time when his mother entered the hospital for heart disease, but he was fooling around with other women for months before.  One day I saw Anthony with a needle in the school bathroom, he said he was “shooting smack” into his veins.  I looked at him with a look of peculiarity, although he might have interpreted it as me being judgmental.  Anthony looked me straight in the eye and spoke with a deep rasp in his voice, “wouldn’t you?”, as if I could ever relate to his turmoil.  That was when Anthony told me his story, and I have never forgotten his words.
Far down the car, almost opposite of where I was sitting, a middle-aged woman, tall and with subtly stunning features, remained engrossed in the barren outside view of the tunnel provided by the cabin window.  I remembered her story now; it had been on the news not all too long ago.  Her husband lost his job in the aftermath of the dot–com bubble, some fortune five hundred that he worked for.  The canning hit him hard, I knew that for certain.  It left him with a sense of meaninglessness.  That was when the violence started, not because he wanted it to, but because he was hopeless.  For it is in the darkest times that a man turns to his most primeval of urges.  He had a knock to his swing as he hit her in his moments of rage, but once subsided he became wrought with guilt and remorse, wishing, even praying for his repentance.  One day she took the kids to the park while he built with his tools in the basement, the one activity that brought him purpose in life.  When they came back the kids rushed down to hug their father, but what they saw was only a limp body slouched on the steps with a bullet hole in the back of the head.  I could never imagine witnessing such a horror.  A man so hopeless, it seemed as though even God had turned his back on him. 
And as urban life decayed in the void, I felt myself contemplating the microcosm that was our subway car.  My troubles soon found themselves at the desk of a final arbiter, ready to be struck down by the keeper’s gavel, retreating from their final moment of acumen.  Thus, I feel it was fair, not that sorrow be placed upon me, but that it was deserved to me.  Kneeling below the desk of assertion, my body slowly began to rise, and I witnessed my arbiter’s true form.  Nestled in that void was a reflection, and in that mirror I saw my terrified face staring back at me.  Only then was justice served, is there none that does good?