That poor girl....

So we’re on the way back from Brooklyn on the A Train. After the first two stops this bum walks onto the train. Long gray overcoat, ashy elbows, brown paper bags, and lots of phlegm. So we play it off like he’s not there but then the smell hit. GOD DAMN! He pulls a half-eaten chicken leg out of his brown paper bag, a chicken leg that was right out of the hot garbage. We sat and watched him. Watched the spit trail from the dark meat to his chapped, scabby mouth. His hands covered in dirt and his nose dripping with snot, we watched him enjoy his garbage, wash it down with some Snake bite brew and use his half jacket as a towel for his lubed up hands. So the train stops and he grabs the pole with his greased up, wormy fingers to stand up and half spit up, half vomit outside the doors of the train, then stumbles back to his seat.
The shine of his palm prints glisten in the flickering lights of that now even dirtier subway and at the next stop a girl with long, brown, beautifully flowing to the top of her buttocks hair, hitches a ride in our car. In slow motion I see her eye up the available seats and decide to stand against the pole that our man chicken fingers had a tight grip on minutes earlier. It was like static electricity. Her hair wrapped around the pole attracted to the greasy circles of chicken spit the fingerprints had left. Our reaction: you know that video clip of the guy who’s kickboxing and his leg snaps in half on a shin kick…and then he tries to stand on it because he doesn’t even realize the treachery his leg has just endured…watching that. The "ooooh" followed shortly after by the even worse, "OOOOooooo!" We clenched our fists and watched with every wave, every bump, every motion of the train, more and more hair find its way to the pole and swim around in the filth of the now soundly sleeping homeless man across from us on the A train.