Assistant Editor Jess Silfa: “In Transit” is a sharp, lyrical meditation on the vulnerability and rage at moving through public space in a queer, feminine body. The voice is clear-eyed and intimate, full of tension, tenderness, and a fierce awareness of power and danger. Lines such as “a tender soul is tender meat” stayed with me long after I finished reading, as did its startling ending. I am delighted we’re publishing this piece.
Listen to Gibb read the essay:
In Transit
I try to picture them all as babies. Whenever my stomach lurches around a man, I remind myself he once toddled around in diapers, loved a mother, bit with milk teeth and only milk teeth.
The guy on the bus waltzes to the back, two rows behind me, talking loudly into his iPhone: the way these bitches act I swear I’m gonna fucking stab someone you hear me man she said my kid came out of her pussy then I’m gonna shove that motherfucker right back up her pussy— I put my earbuds in, do not press play.
I look away when the man on the train puts a pipe to his lips, fist rapping rhythmically on the cold plastic seat. When he blows, it’s a harmonica, bitter honeyache whistling over subway ticks and steely moans. I am embarrassed. I am a callous, miscalculating bitch. What’s that saying, humans have always been inclined to make music instead of violence? Love over war? Assume music. But I remember how these songs can disarm a girl, soften her for stabbing. A tender soul is tender meat.
She was homeless, everyone said about Debrina Kawam. Last December we sucked on these words to sleep. It was all the way in Coney Island, the very last stop on the F. Do you even know anyone who’s been to Stillwell Ave? Do you even know what happens when he wakes her up by flicking a flame onto her coat? He watched her burn from a bench, the Times reported, and they later identified him because he kept the lighter in his pocket for days.
When my girlfriend and I are in transit, it’s easier to avoid holding hands. I don’t respect you at all, the man once mumbled to us, drunk. No one in the packed car looked up because he is actually the best you can hope for in this situation (no slurs! no hands!). We might be the luckiest dykes in the city. What if I just fell on top of you right now? And kissed you, he added, white-knuckling the subway pole.
Over drinks Henry tells me, laughing, about the time he fell asleep on an empty 1-car after a late night at work. He woke up at 242nd Street and says the funniest part of the whole thing was how long it took to figure out where to cross the train platform to head back downtown, roaming up and down the station like a madman.
My fifteen-year-old brother sends me TikTok videos from suburban Colorado with titles like “NYC SUBWAY IS INSANE” and it’s a man dancing with a parrot on his shoulder, an old woman pushing a shopping cart full of tattered blankets. I try to explain to him that this is never what we meant.
Most of the time it’s quieter, like when you’re nineteen and cut it a little close on a mountain highway U-turn and the grown man in a gray Toyota speeds up from behind to right beside you, ramming you off the road, cornering you with his car in the wheatgrass. He rolls down his window and flips you off, screaming so loud and vicious that his face swells crimson and you wonder if there’s anything in your glove box you could use to shield your body if he gets closer. You wonder if he will kill you, so you turn off the radio. After a few minutes he tires himself out. He leaves, wheels on the road like rubber sirens.
You drive home in silence, going exactly the speed limit.
Bella Gibb (she/her) is a writer living in New York City. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she has had work featured in New Delta Review and Points in Case. She is currently thinking about which US presidents were probably a little bit gay. Instagram: @bellstagramm_
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