Lili's Magical Realism

By Lili Constantinopoulos

An old man grunts as he forcefully pushes me aside as the squeaky , filthy metro halts to a stop. I wince a little as my back slams into the wall of the inside of the metro. Eyes of other passengers flick up to me and then back down again, goig back to whatever they were doing just a second ago. Moments later the metro doors open, the old man topples out of the metro. I watch him through the window, and see him trying to keep his balance while stumbling from side to side as he gets lost within the crowd. As im watching him the metro gets flooded with new passengers, most of their eyes emotionless, just staring tino space, plenty of faces looking half alive, or rather half dead, however you wanna call it. The squeaky metro starts driving again as bodies squeeze and push into one another, you can sense the lack of oxygen in here as you inhale the sour-ish air, luckily for me I get to finally get out of here at the upcoming stop. As the metro, once again, squeakly halts to a stop, I manage to squeeze myself through the sweaty crowd of bodies, i feel the soles of my shosslightly stick to the metro floor before i finally squeeze myself out of the metro. The air doesnt feel a lot better here than it did in the metro, it still has this faint, almost sour taste to it. I get out of the station and start walking down the long road that leads straight to the school I go to. I honestly hate this life im living, I've not always had to live like this, I used to live in the good part of town, I used to live in a 3 story house, but ever since my father decided to gamble all our money 4 years ago, and then fled the country because of it, it left my mom no other choce but to sell everything we had, including our house and cars. We then had to move into our now “home”, a one bedroom studio apartment with a tiny kitchen which is connected to the also tiny living room. There is a small bathroom which consists of a shower, a toilet and a small sink. Ever since my father had left us, my mom quit her job and she found something to replace the “happiness” that my father used to give her, at least that's what she calls it. As I arrive to the front steps of the school I take a deep breath before entering. I then walk up the steps, I take a left and then a right in the hallway and enter the classroom. I look around and my heart drops a little bit when I see that Jessica, basically the only person I talk to here , isn't here today. Without Jessica to talk to, the day passes quite slowly, I try to listen to what the teachers are saying and during the breaks I read a book. Without Jessica at school nothing very interesting happened, during lunch there was a fight between two groups of girls and Thomas got tripped again by some bullies but these incidents or nothing out of the ordinary. At the end of the day I walk down the same road back to the metro station, the sticky smelling air entering my nostrils as I wait for the metro to come. When the metro comes I step in squeezing past other people again, I have to take six stops to get home people pushing against each other every time the metro comes to a stop. As I get to my appartement building, there is a homelless woman sitting on the doorsteps. She is asleep and I don’t want to wake her up but I still have to get home so I lightly tap on her shoulder. She’s still dead asleep so I tap her a bit harder, she jolts up, startled, as she’s catching up her breath she looks up at me. I tell her softly that I just need to get inside, she’s still staring at me, me being confused and a bit startled myself now, I decide to just walk around her. As I’m carefully walking around her, she suddenly grabs my leg, I scream and she mutters something under her breath. I decide to kick my foot to set myself free, she lets go and I look back and she’s gone within half a second. I look around the street, looking for the woman and then I realise that one seems to have noticed that anything happened, I mean honestly these things do happen often in this part of town, so most people tend not to realise. I decide to get inside as fast as I can. I walk up two sets of stairs, I get to my apartment door and have to basically break it down after unlocking it. As I enter the appartement I do what I usually do, I walk around the appartement and pick up the empty, various bottles of alcohol that my mom isn’t capable of picking up herself. Then I go to look for my mom in her room since she wasn’t on the sofa. As I enter her bedroom, I expect to see her sleeping in her bed, but to my shock she isnt there. That’s when I start panicking, she isn’t capable of being out in this part of town right now, not like this. I hope she’s in the bathroom so I start desperately banging on the door, there’s no answer and the door creaks open. I start pacing around the room, I have no idea what to do, I have no idea where she could be. I go back to her bed to sit down and hopefully figure out where she is, when I sit down, I feel something crinkle under me. I stand up to see what I sat down on, it’s a folded up piece of paper, I open it and there’s a pencil drawing of my mom, but she’s not alone, next to her is a pencil drawing of the homeless woman.