The train rocked on its rails, a sleepy sway like a weary drunken sailor, lolling its way down the tracks in no particular hurry to reach its destination.  Which suited me just fine; I longed for the blissful Maw of Morpheus, having been deprived of all but a scant four hours of slumber the night before, and the gentle cradle-swing motion helped me drift between the living and the spectral world of dreams.

As my head knocked against the car’s dense window and my back screamed for a more comfortable position, I waded through foggy awareness and bordered the realm of hypnogogia.  The passengers seemed as sleepy and quiet as I, and voices never penetrated the gloom of my peaceful isolation.  Occasionally, the conductor whisked through seeking fares and clacked his rapid-fire hole-punch through someone’s ticket.  He passed as a phantom below me and banged through the separator doors of the car.  Some time before the train reached port I roused from my semi-slumber enough to stand, shoulder my pack and disembark.

What happened next, I don’t know.  I didn’t notice an especially jostling or large crowd.  I didn’t see any extraordinary density of humanity on the platform.  But when the door slid open to allow the bustle of humanity to spill from the cavernous train bank into the station, pandemonium ensued.

A whitewater river of people crossed paths through the train station, crashing like a fast-moving estuary, some headed for one exit, some across their paths toward escalators to another.  Neither band of traffic was willing to yield to the other, for yielding meant doom -- given the weakness of courtesy the denizens of trainville plowed ahead one after the other until the one showing courtesy must abandon all civility and charge ahead or never reach their destination.  The seeming endless swath of humanity pouring as a dam gate from my left and the one of which I was a part collided in the confines of the hall like two spiral galaxies merging in space.  Destruction, chaos, eruptions of matter and energy on massive, incomprehensible scales.

Hesitance cost several dearly.  They got shoved aside, cut off, nudged with prejudice right and left.  I lowered my head, my body still asleep, my mind refusing to accept its predicament.  I plodded ahead at the same speed, ignoring the bumper-car pinballing as my shoulders swatted left, right, torquing my body side to side, tipping me forward or pushing me back.  I dipped my shoulders and held my elbows tight to my sides, hands tucked into pockets, and pressed on.  It was like trying to drag a side of beef through a pack of ravenous wolves.  Snarling, frothing muzzles bared and snapped, icteric canines dripping spit.

Ah, good morning.

I passed through the current of human debris and emerged into a less crowded corridor.  Impatient commuters huffed angry sounds of agitation as they stomped around an elderly woman frantically pushing a squeaking, squealing walker ahead of her, tiny sounds of fear drifting from her toothless mouth, eyes panicked and desperate.  A blind man tapped a vicious warning tattoo on the stone floor, swung his long, supple white cane to and fro at the feet of the oncoming army of drones, clearing his path with vindictive deliberation.  Groggy, I yawned and rode the escalator to the street above, and came out into the crisp snap of cool morning air.  The clammy slap of slipstream as the doors parted to the outside woke me a little, circulated my blood and reminded me of standing on the deck of a ferry crossing the San Francisco bay, though the smell of salt mist and brine was replaced with exhaust fumes and wet asphalt.  Taxis immersed in dirty brown water nearly halfway up their tires stood alongside the curb in a miniature lake.  The tiny ocean stretched from corner to corner along the front of the buzzing hive of the train station, and I perched a brow in curiosity at what caused the deluge.  I lost interest a second later.

The manic press of people on the street struck me as unusual.  It’s Monday, and Mondays are slower, less populace than other days.  I always assumed masses took Mondays off from work, either by hooky or by request, to recover from weekends spent indulging in the great pastime of The Big City: drinking.  Today, not so.  The hoard of suit-clad, heel-clicking automatons rushed along the streets.  I stepped aside at the tramp of running high heels, and a petite woman threaded through commuters and slalomed to the corner, thwarted by the streetlight.  I waded into the mob behind her a moment later, her dance of anticipation and frenetic toe-tap wearing on my nerves.  At last the light changed and she bolted like a thoroughbred racehorse through a starting gate, click-clacking away down the cobbled and pitted concrete sidewalk.

Everywhere as I strode, determined to neither rush nor tarry, there seemed an extra urgency, an added sense of worry and agitation.  Everyone seemed to move faster, to push harder to reach their unknown points of arrival.  Their journeys stopped intersecting mine at last when I found a gap between clots of them.  For some reason, despite being stalled at another streetlight for a few minutes, none of them overtook me on their way in my direction, and I never caught up to those ahead of me.  I never do.  I never want to, truth be told.  I walked in solitude with an unobtrusive companion of breeze chilling my face and reminding me of a place I’ve not seen in years.

When I got to work I waddled into the sundry store for my coffee and water, and found I too lacked the patience to wait for the store attendant woman who annoys me day-in, day-out with her propensity to leave me standing at the counter while she finishes whatever menial task she’s tending, unmindful of my need to keep working or get to work so she can be paid.  Today another attendant minded the counter while she tagged refrigerated beverages on condensation-covered plastic bottles.  She sang her good morning and I returned it with a smile, then reached around her body and opened a refrigerator case’s sliding door, forcing her to extract her hands from the other side of the cabinet or have them smashed by the double-doors.  She was trying to ask me to wait, but I was sick of waiting for her, sick of her cavalier attitude with the time of others, sick of her self-important demeanor and attempts to make executives and officers of the company kowtow to her.  She had to ask me to let her re-tag the bottle in my hand, the prices were changing she said, and I paused my motion long enough for her to swipe her price tag gun over the old sticker.  The new one was twelve cents more.  I grabbed my coffee, and went out.

As I write this, I have no idea what was special about this morning, why the normal quiet of a Monday collapsed to a frenzied crush of hurried, harried attitudes and running commuters.  I have no idea why the idyllic slumber of the train was shattered by the cacophony of the train station’s bustle, or why I was irritated with the sundry store woman and her price gun.

All I know is this week dawned dark and brooding, a rousing beast within a dank and murky cave, baleful eyes glowing red and angry, wet nostrils spewing acrid, moist smoke.  I hear scales clattering and talons scratch on the floor.

Or maybe I’m just sleepy and it’s all my imagination.  Whichever.