An Excerpt

Most of the faces on the 2:17AM BART train in Wednesday's damp darkness were the same, the variance of riders on this run--as others-- consisting largely of two-legged hard cases, street people committing some of what little change they had to get tickets from the vending machines along the route.

Mel wondered whether they were headed to… or from, and where, but dismissed the thought, hoisting her briefcase from the train’s floor to her lap.

The simultaneous, unison snaps of the locks’ release were shrouded in the hum of the train’s electric power and taps of the car’s wheels negotiating the rail connectors.

Wedged between the top of a Tupperware sandwich holder and paperback novel, she removed the polished, black alligator-bound day planner and the top of the briefcase closed, pressed into service as a desktop.

Mel found the familiar tab to the lined paper section of the planner and, from the cuff of the Burberry overcoat, a milk-white wrist rotated to effect the slight twist her manicured fingertips needed for the barrel of a $400 pen to ease from it’s leather loop.

She leafed through pages of love letters drafted on other days’ commutes into San Francisco, letters that would never find the closure of an envelope, that would never find a stamp or bear the ink of an address to a lover she couldn’t identify.