What Lives in the Static: Part 2 (2025)

What Lives in the Static: Part 2 (1)

Nora hates waiting for the subway on nights like this. Hates it.

If this night were a movie—she plays this game with herself often—it would be a series of quick cuts.

Nora by the bar, turning to sip her drink and scan the crowd—jump cut—Nora making eye contact with a hot femme in a cutoff white tank, silver chains, and a shag cut, who smiles and waves and bites her lip before turning away—jump cut—Nora sucking her drink down in record time and pushing through the crowd into the pit—jump cut—finding the femme, pulling her in and whispering in her ear—jump cut—they’re kissing, the femme’s ring-laden fingers wrapped in her hair, pulling Nora’s face into her own—match cut this time—Nora, giggling, pulls the femme through the crowd and past the bouncer, and when they burst through the door, still attached at the lips, they’re in the femme’s apartment. Door slams. Cut to black.

But it’s not and now Nora’s standing on the Bedford Ave. subway platform, waiting for the train that’ll take her to the femme’s Williamsburg apartment—an apartment that will likely betray the fact that the meticulous shag, sterling silver chains, Dickies work pants, and Blundstone boots are all paid for by a cushy tech paycheck or family money.

Not that Nora has room to judge. From a certain angle, fucking her probably looks like riding the Lockheed Martin pride float. She knows that.

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The femme is talking to her, leaning on her, pulling Nora out of her neon indie daydream and back into a reality that’s rapidly losing momentum.

“Remind me your name,” the femme says, running a thumb—complete with a chunky silver cigar ring—over Nora’s bottom lip, which Nora hates being predictable enough to love.

“Addy,” Nora lies.

“Addy,” she repeats, leaning in to kiss Nora. “I’m Sam.”

Nora, if she had any friends she trusted with this sort of information and a group chat to contain them all, would text them in that moment: HOT FEMME UNISEX NAME THUMB RINGS IM IN DANGER, and they would send back something like a gif from the Lonely Island “I Just Had Sex” video with Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone holding a cake that says “Congrats On The Sex” or a deluge of scissor emojis.

Instead, she shoots a glance at the subway countdown clock to make sure they have at least five minutes and pulls the hot femme—heretofore referred to as “Sam”—into her, leading them both towards the cleanest-looking steel column. The height difference between them is negligible, but Nora uses the one-inch difference to look up with the widest, bedroom-iest, ruin-my-life-iest eyes.

“You’re really pretty,” Nora-called-Addy says, twirling a lock of Sam’s hair between her fingers with one and threading the fingers of the other through Sam’s belt loops.

They are so close that light is already fighting to get between them when Nora leads a trail of kisses from Sam’s collarbone to her jaw. Her ersatz date giggles and slides her hands into Nora’s back pockets, squeezing with just enough force to make her stomach flip and cause an embarrassingly sincere blush to spread across her face.

She desperately needs to know what Sam’s sheets look like—if they are plain, patterned, or floral. She needs to know what kind of books she owns and whether she can see them from the bed or the couch. This train, along with the other parties involved, cannot come fast enough.

They are so close that light is already fighting to get between them when Nora leads a trail of kisses from Sam’s collarbone to her jaw. Her ersatz date giggles and slides her hands into Nora’s back pockets, squeezing with just enough force to make her stomach flip and cause an embarrassingly sincere blush to spread acro—

No, wait, that’s already happened. Shit.

A single time anomaly, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t a huge deal and happens more often than people realize. Nora knows better than most that the fabric of the space-time continuum is less like the leather of her jacket and more like cheesecloth or linen.

Point is, this is a fast city with a lot of things happening all at once and even time struggles to keep up now and then. Even the Universe needs to buffer, she supposes.

But pursuing an anomaly? On her night off? That’s Research Division work, not Reconciliations. And as of 3PM today- when her request for transfer to research was denied, again, for the second year in a row- she’s definitely still the latter. So this feels less like a Her problem and more like a Them problem.

Besides, Sam’s hands have shifted from her back pockets to a slow, deliberate journey under her perfectly vintage, thrashed-to-hell $60 single-stitch stepping-out tee, and Nora much prefers where this is headed to the prospect of giving a statement to a pack of field agents who’ve likely never considered that Nora from Reconciliations might be an unapologetic girlkisser or enjoy anything remotely fun.

Some of the newer recruits—the ones fresh from far more monochromatic towns than New York City—already struggle to reconcile her face with her decidedly Scottish surname, Thompson. Nora refuses to make it easy for them, either, by explaining that her proprietary mix of “Chinese mom, white dad” isn’t all that unique in her homecorner of the Bay Area.

She looks back at the arrival times and they haven't moved, which doesn’t bode well for her initial plan to ignore the anomaly and wait for someone else to bring it up on Monday when she can pretend she was already in bed preparing for another week of being Corporate Nora.

Corporate Nora — the one who goes to bed at reasonable hours, finishes all her reports by the end of the day, drinks enough water and doesn’t complain when her new boss tells her, yet again, that she’s not ready for the promotion her old boss had promised was practically hers.

Distantly, she feels Sam’s hand gently pull her chin back for another kiss.

“Hey,” Sam smiles into it. “Where’d you go?”

“Sorry, I thought I saw someth-”

The cacophony of an incoming train cuts her off, and she doesn’t bother trying to finish the sentence. The platform fills with the usual screech of brakes and unintelligible MTA announcements, projected full-blast from speakers no less than 30 years out of date.

But something’s wrong. The announcements are more garbled than usual, as though they’re being shouted from some distant, hollow place. The scream of metal meeting metal is harsher, sharper—digging into her ear and making her left eye twitch. It’s the sound of something tearing.

And the smell—well, there isn’t one. No ozone. No hot metal. Not even the dank water that collects in puddles under the rails, mixing with old lubricant and hydraulic fluid into a sickly rainbow sheen that even the hardiest of rats avoid.

Nothing. Just sound. Distorted, strangled, piercing sound, layered with a low hum that rises and harmonizes with the chaos and a buzz that settles behind her eyes and fills her vision with TV static snow.

The train finally grinds to a halt, its motion somehow out of sync with the accompanying noise, and Nora gets a better look at it. Instead of the chrome-and-blue cars of the Canarsie line—or really, any modern subway train—there’s a single car of riveted steel, painted a deep forest green.

The imaginary movie in her head shifts. It’s no longer a neon-lit indie flick but a gritty, low-budget awards darling: an over-the-shoulder handheld tracking shot that follows her as she untangles herself from Sam and slowly walks toward the subway car.

The doors hiss open, revealing a puff of cigarette smoke and several pairs of confused eyes. Their owners, wearing paper hats declaring it to be NYE 1975, blink in her general direction. Incandescent overhead lights cast a jarring yellow glow, mixing with the haze of smoke and giving the whole scene the surreal quality of a late-night TV rerun.

The passengers stare at Nora, but she gets the uneasy impression they’re not really seeing her. They’re looking through her—past her—to the not-that-futuristic subway platform beyond. A platform none of them seem willing to step onto.

“Is that us?” Sam, whom Nora has all but forgotten, asks behind her.

“No. Uh, wrong train.” Nora spins around quickly, sheepdogging Sam away from the open doors of the subway car.

Nora looks back at the hats. It’s not even December. This isn’t a run-of-the-mill time loop or echo.

This is bad, Nora thinks. Bad enough to override the airtight lid she keeps on her personal life for all but a handful trusted coworkers and call it in. She reaches for the carabiner of keys at her waist, her fingers felling for the smooth, pebble-like fob nestled between her house key and CVS ExtraCare card and pressing down on it. She doesn’t want to break eye contact with the train car but knows she has 30 seconds to run outside, find a signal, and answer the call that will come from dispatch shortly.

“I’m so sorry, babe.” Nora raises Sam’s hand to her lips, kissing each finger. “But something’s come up with work. I have to take a quick call. I’ll be right back.”

“Work?” Sam sounds more confused than disappointed. “It’s like 2AM.”

“I know, I’m sorry.” She doesn’t wait to see if her second apology is accepted. “Give me five?”

Her back pocket starts buzzing just as she steps out onto the street. She takes a deep lungful of fresh air before picking up.

A familiar voice greets her on the other end—Jake, the assistant to the Director of Operations and one of her few work friends.

“Nora, my love, don’t do this to me,” he begs. “I’m nearly off.”

“I know, Jake, I know. But I’ve got an anomaly, and I need a containment team and an extraction.”

Jake sighs, dragging the sound out until it turns into a theatrical groan.

“My sincerest apologies, Your Grace,” Nora replies in what she considers—quite humbly—an impeccable Regency-era British accent, earned by virtue of an adolescent hyperfixation on Jane Austen adaptations. She debates whether to throw him a bone by mentioning this is interrupting her date night as well. “I’ll try to schedule my chrono anomalies for your off nights.”

“Chrono? No shit?”

“Yeah, localized temporal distortion and all.” She can hear the squeak of his desk chair as he sits up straight at the revelation. “The works.”

“What kind of extraction do you need?”

“I need an agented cab to run someone home.” Credit where credit’s due, this is one of Nora’s favorite features of the job: fake cabs to move civilians to and from event sites, driven by field agents. Ingenious way of operating in plain sight, if anyone was asking her.

“I’m at the Bedford Ave. L train station on the westbound platform. I have one civilian that needs to be taken home. She didn’t clock the anomaly.”

Nora pauses.

“Pun not intended.”

“Date?”

“I’d thank you to mind your business, Jake,” she says in a mock-authoritative tone before softening. “I’ll tell you on Monday.”

“Femme with a unisex name?” he guesses.

“Femme with a unisex name!” she laughs, a genuine wheeze and unflattering snort escaping her.

“Alright, I’ve got an agented cab three blocks away, and the containment team is fifteen minutes out. Can you hang tight?”

“Babes, my night literally went up in flames. I have fuck-all to do for the next fifteen minutes.”

The line disconnects, and Nora sprints back into the subway station, relieved to find Sam still waiting. She’s less relieved to see that the lone train car is gone.

“Hey, I’m so sorry,” she says, grabbing Sam’s hand with one arm and sliding the other behind her back to lead her toward the exit. “I’m afraid I need to call it a night. I got you a cab.”

“Work?” Sam’s disappointment is palpable this time.

“Yeah, I’m sorry, small emergency.”

“Wait, what’s your job?”

“MTA. There’s an—uh—subway emergency.” People don’t usually ask her this many questions, and for a moment, Nora feels a genuine admiration for the improv skills that being a field agent must necessitate. “That’s why I called you a cab.”

The agented cab materializes, and Nora wrestles her badge from her jacket pocket, surreptitiously flashing it to the agent-turned-cabby. He nods, hops out of the driver’s seat, and jogs around to open the door for Sam.

Nora watches as the young agent’s eyes travel from her hair—normally pulled into a neat low bun on weekdays but now tied into a high ponytail, with loose tendrils plastered to the sheen of sweat on her forehead—to her ripped tee, her beat-up leather jacket covered in pins, and, inevitably, the heart-shaped pink glitter enamel pin proclaiming “FEMME4FEMME.” His gaze flicks back up to her eyes, rimmed with enough smeared black eyeliner to make a raccoon jealous, far removed from the understated swipe of champagne shadow and black mascara she wears to work.

“I didn’t know you transferred to Field,” he finally says.

“I didn’t.”

She watches the cab pull away, its taillights vanishing safely around the corner, taking with it the hot civilian with whom she’d envisioned spending a very different night.

The imaginary camera crew following her shifts again—this time to the final shot of a slick crime drama. The camera slowly lifts to an aerial view of the street as no less than three—but certainly no more than five—unmarked black SUVs descend, agents spilling into the subway in a coordinated flurry of motion.

Roll credits.

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What Lives in the Static: Part 2 (2025)
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