Blue Piccadilly
By Sinclair Adams
On June 18th at 5:43 p.m., a train in the London Tube disappeared. Somewhere between South Kensington and Knightsbridge, the entire structure dissolved. The plastic frames, the metallic handlebars, the rolling bogie, the fabric seats, and all the dirt smudged in between.
The passengers didn’t disappear. The carriage around them stopped existing, flinging the passengers over the grind of the black tracks. Their bodies shredded like animal carcass pressed through a grater.
One man survived because he happened to land on top of the other bodies as they began to stack up. He only suffered one injury, his arm cut clean off against the wall.
He ran to the next station through the unlit tunnel just in time before the following train could catch up and take him out.
Officials halted all railways on the Piccadilly Line. Not all the bodies were identified, transformed into red chunks and splatters in the dark tunnel.
They asked the survivor what happened.
“The train turned into millions of little pieces. The pieces all flew away like a swarm of bees. Then the pieces of the lightbulbs went away, and I couldn’t see anything anymore.”
Other eyewitnesses who were standing near the closest subway exits noticed something matching the man’s description – clouds of particles traveling up into the air, winding through the stairwells up the London underground, then spreading apart in clear pathways across the sky.
The public demanded answers. Was the molecular dissolution of public structures a new kind of terrorism? Or maybe some unknowable invisible-god-hand just wanted to squish something large and fast in its grasp? Perhaps this was a sign of the End Times.
The truth was that the train simply decided it didn’t want to be a train anymore. All of its molecules realized they were never really part of a train in the first place. They decided to split up, as groups tend to do after a while. The beads of plastic and the flecks of steel flew across the earth and back to their homes where they belonged. Buried deep underground, nestled safe and quiet, and they would no longer have to move fast again.
Sinclair Adams (they/she) received an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University in Spring 2023. Their short fiction has been published in The Bitchin’ Kitsch, OFIC Magazine, and Across the Margins. They are a frequent contributor of speculative fiction and genre book reviews to The Soapberry Review.