The No. 6 Train

The little blond haired girl stood at the edge of the train platform bending her tippy toes in the pink slippers over the yellow “do-not-stand-here” line. She wore her hair in pigtails and her green and yellow Tinkerbell backpack dangled from her left shoulder. She looked to be about ten or eleven years old. The woman standing a few paces away from her stared at her a while and wondered idly where her mother was, but shrugged eventually, leaned her head against one of the dark metal pillars and shook her iPod to get it to change the playlist. She bobbed her head appreciatively when Akon’s I Promise came on.
A few minutes later the rush-hour crowd flooded down the stairs to wait for the No. 6 train. There was noise and confusion, and the bodies of strangers pushed and shoved against each other as each struggled to find some air or a place to rest their weary feet. Somehow in the crush of humanity, Tinkerbell was knocked from the little girl’s shoulder onto the train tracks. The girl did not hesitate; she jumped in at once after her Tinkerbell.
A tall man standing in back of the crowd started as he saw the little body disappear from his view. He had noticed the child before the crowd surged in to close the gap between them but had been otherwise involved in an argument with his girlfriend. Get away from the yellow line—you are not supposed to stand so close to the tracks he had wanted to say to the little girl who reminded him of his own sister. Instead he had found himself saying repeatedly to placate the irate girl standing nearer to him, “I’m sorry. Yes, you were right. You were right about everything.”  Now he broke off abruptly to turn full-body in the direction of the little girl. “Did you see that, Kate?” He asked urgently. “Did that little girl just jump onto the tracks?” His voice seemed to jerk as uneasily as his thoughts. Already he was pushing at the people in front of him, trying to get through the thick of the crowd. The warning light in the tunnel turned from orange to a brilliant green. The people at the front of the crowd felt the rush of the cold, sweeping wind that precedes a speeding train.
“Oh my God, the train’s coming!” Somebody screamed.
As though waking from a deep sleep, the woman with the iPod—who was also closest to the child—jerked the earphones from her ears and called out sharply, “Lie down between the tracks, silly girl.” The crowd picked up her chant and began to echo it loudly, urgently.
“Lie down between the tracks!”
“Lie down between the tracks!”
The little girl turned terrified eyes up to meet the crowd. She gawked at the train, the crowd then back at the train. She tried desperately to climb back up and found that she was too short to reach up high enough. Miss iPod repeated, “Lie down!”
Only the tall man who had not quite made his way to the front of the platform had a different solution to offer.
He shouted over the many heads, “Somebody please grab her hand! Pull her up!”
Nobody moved.
“Pull her up!”
The train drew closer.
The girl tested the depth of the track gingerly with her foot. The expression on her face was horrified as she shook her head at the crowd: “No.” She moved to press her tiny body into the platform wall. The motorman on the train sounded his horn eight times in helpless warning. She closed her eyes and pushed still further against the wall. The train did not stop.
This story is based, quite unfortunately, on actual events.