Written on the Subway Walls

For February, The Sunday Morning Transport brings you stories by Jennifer Hudak, John Chu, Carrie Vaughn, and Marie Brennan. As always, the first story of the month is free to read.

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This week, Jennifer Hudak’s story maps the subterranean life of a very particular voice along gorgeous pathways.

~ Julian and Fran, February 2, 2025

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Written on the Subway Walls

by Jennifer Hudak

When machinery cleaved rock and stone, I was born. When steel scraped against soil, creating open space where there had been only darkness, the earth whispered, Look!

I came into being then: a furrow in the ground. A trench. A pathway opened to the chill blue sky. The earth shifted and sighed around me, and named all that I was seeing, which had not existed in the darkness before my birth. Air, it whispered. And birds, and clouds. And then, soon after, water.

It rushed in: a flooding tumble that filled me like oxygen, like lifeblood. I remember its caress. The boats buoyed on top, weighty and wide. Lake Erie reaching out with distant, icy fingertips; the mighty Genesee shouting greetings as my canal improbably soared through the aqueduct above it, a flying waterway carved from stone. I remember touching both lake and ocean, sweet and salt.

Somewhere in time, the shadow of ships still darkens my floors. Somewhere in time, Lake Ontario and the Genesee River slosh over their banks and claim the land for their own. But now, in this moment, what am I? A hollow space beneath a highway. An aqueduct without its water. A canvas for tags and hasty murals and bubble-letter slogans. A memory. A ghost.

And what does that make you?

#

When you first creep into my tunnel, I barely register your presence. You are that small, that quiet. I assume you are like the others who sometimes sneak their way inside, furtive and brash, wielding cans of paint. Making art, or simply writing their own names over and over. Sending a message to anyone who might follow. Saying, Don’t forget me. Saying, I was here.

From those visitors, I gather what I have always gathered from humans: words. The rhythms of their speech—rushing like water, rumbling like trains—echoing through my emptiness. Descriptions of a world in flux, a world I once knew, but will never see again.

The humans don’t know that I’m listening. None of them even recognize my presence, my voice, my breath. No one ever did, until you.

You are a runaway, small and scared, escaping the rain and the police and other dangers that lurk on street corners. You run your fingers against some of the graffiti painted on the steel guardrail just outside the tunnel: not a tag, not some of the more elaborate artwork, just a quote from an old song about prophets writing on subway walls. Something about it makes you smile, briefly.

You make your way inside—stepping carefully over rubble, finding a spot free of broken glass and cigarette butts to sit and lean against the inner wall—and I see that you are both younger and older than I expected. Your brown skin is smooth and unlined, your limbs growth-spurt scrawny. But your eyes, shining like glass, do not look like a child’s eyes. They have seen too much, too soon, and it’s all still there, just behind your gaze: a stack of unforgotten experiences, overlaid on top of each other like sheets of rain-damp newspaper.

“Who’s there?” you call suddenly, your voice high and thin.

I do not imagine that you’re speaking to me. No human has ever spoken to me before. Still, I withdraw slightly, startled by the way your words cut through the silence.

You stand then, hands outstretched. “I’m leaving, okay? I’m leaving.”

Wait.

My own voice, rough with disuse, sounds like dust and rusted iron, broken glass and twisted rebar. I don’t know why I spoke; I do not for a moment think you will hear me.

But you stop, head cocked to the side. As if you did hear. As if you could. And oh! How I ache for someone to talk to.

I won’t hurt you, I say. Please. Stay.

“Who are you? Where are you?” you call, still taut as a wire, still ready to bolt.

I . . . I am here.

Your eyes search the darkness, panicked. “What the fuck does that mean?”

I have absorbed millions of words since my inception, but I cannot make them say what I want to say. So I try other ways to make you understand. I murmur like the waters used to when they lapped my sides, when they tickled the bottoms of the barges. I creak and click like iron gears turning, opening and closing the locks, making the water rush and drain, rush and drain, allowing the boats to climb uphill and back down again. I stretch my full length in this tunnel, as if I could once again reach from west to east: an industrial marvel, a grand connection, integral to the formation of the city.

I wouldn’t have said it was a test, but in any case, you pass. You swallow again, and steel.

“I thought you were going to be a dragon.”

What a strange thing to say! I settle back into myself, into this small section of tunnel that hasn’t yet been filled in with concrete and stone. I’m not.

#

I remember when the water drained, diverted to a new trench that skirted the city, and I became something else: a different kind of rushing, a different kind of flow.

Noisy trains on iron tracks. Doors that opened and shut; wires that zapped and popped; sharp staccato. And people! They trod within me, for the first time! Footwear clicking smartly against stone. The intimacy of their breathing bodies—they pull the tunnel’s air deep inside their lungs, take what they need to survive, and then whoosh! Out it comes again! Changed but still the same, just like me. It was from the mouths of people that I learned the word that now described me: subway. The earth had withdrawn, its voice drowned out by screech and rattle and spark. So, too, had the water, and the sky. But no matter. I had fire and smoke. I was busy and bustling. I was alive and electric.

And then, change, yet again.

#

Your name, you tell me, is Prophet.

Like the graffiti at the entrance, I say, surprised.

“My dad was super religious. He thought . . .” You shake your head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all kinds of fucked-up. I really don’t want to talk about it.” You run your hands along the tunnel walls, getting to know my mortar and stone. “How about you? What’s your name?”

I don’t know, at first, how to answer. The canal and I had known each other with an intimacy that did not require names, and no one had thought to give me one since. But you had shared yours with me—a sacred offering. So I reach back to my beginning, to the sense of identity I’d never let go, not even when the canal was diverted and my trench became a tunnel, and then this, whatever it is now.

Erie, I say. After the lake far to the west, the source of the canal. That was the name I heard spoken by the people on cargo-laden boats, by the workers operating the locks, and by the men walking their mules alongside. I’ve never seen it, and I never will, but I thought I tasted it in the waters that once flowed here. It had been so long that I’d nearly forgotten.

“Erie,” you repeat. “Like the canal?”

Not the canal. I stop and think. Not just the canal. I stop again. How can I possibly explain what I am, when I can’t even articulate it to myself?

We are both silent for some time, listening to the rain fall outside the tunnel. Sirens in the distance. The thrum of thousands of tires overhead, the rumble of thousands of engines.

“I saw a movie when I was little,” you say, “about a river spirit. All bodies of water have spirits—like avatars, you know? It’s why I thought you were going to be a dragon. I thought you were the spirit of the canal.”

I can still sense the canal, skirting the city. Sometimes I hear its voice, calling a cheery hello from the suburbs. I feel its joy at the people clustering alongside it, the runners and bikers and dog-walkers, the children feeding ducks and dripping ice cream. But that is not me, not anymore.

I’m not the spirit of anything, I finally say. I just am.

“Me too,” you answer. “I just am, same as you.”

#

I smelled it before I knew what it was: the pouring of asphalt, hot and sticky and stinking, drawing a stark line across the city above. Rubber tires and angry horns and people who fly by too quickly to share breath with. What were my trains compared with such speed? Who would choose tunnel walls when they could travel beneath sunlight and stars?

And my empty subway cars were hauled away to trash heaps and museums. And my walls became cavernous and hollow. And my floors, clogged with debris, littered with glass and aluminum and ash.

And I, like the center of the city, was forgotten.

Until the forgotten came to me.

#

You, Prophet, are the first. But not the last.

Not all of the others are young runaways like you. People of all ages can be forced out, rendered extraneous, obsolete. I open to receive them, just as I received you. Voices once again echo against my walls, a dissonant harmony enriching my vocabulary. The air you exhale is skunky and smoky-sweet. I can almost imagine the squeal of the subway cars once again, the skittering of their many-segmented bodies making their way through the tunnel. I imagine my trains carrying you somewhere else, somewhere outside. Somewhere safe.

But then I remember that the city has changed. Most of my tunnel has been filled in to support the new roads overhead, leaving my senses dulled. The center of the city is an island surrounded by an ocean of asphalt, the sound of motors as ceaseless as waves. Trapped, just like you. Just like me.

I want to be of use, I say to you one night, when most of the others have already fallen asleep.

“You are of use,” you whisper back.

Perhaps. But . . . I was created to be a connection. To help the city live and breathe. I used to be that! I used to be so much more. And now . . .

“I get it, Erie, I do. But it’s no use wanting what we can’t have. The expressway is a loop, right? It cuts off the center of the city from the rest. It’s on purpose, you get it? They did it on purpose.”

What do you mean?

You sigh, and once again I see someone far older than your body appear lurking behind your eyes. “Think about it. They moved the canal to the suburbs, right? So that’s where the white people went, too. And where the white people go, that’s where the money goes, and the jobs, and the shiny new buildings and schools and stores. The rest of us, the ones still here—they want us here, inside the loop. We got nowhere else to go.”

I think about how the new canal bed in the suburbs is wider than I am, and deeper. It’s cleaner, too, its overpasses regularly scrubbed and repainted by the city, its locks motorized and gleaming. I feel along my own cracks and crevices, the peeled paint and crumbling walls, and I admit that you’re right. We are all of us unwanted. All of us deliberately forgotten, and there’s nothing any of us can do.

#

The next night, the police come.

Their lights invade me first, bright and glaring, covering up the runes that adorn the walls. Then their voices, amplified by the radios they carry at their hips, punctuated by the sticks they slam against the ground.

“Time to break up the party,” they shout.

Wait, I say as you scramble to your feet. Where are you going?

“If we stay, they’ll fuck us up.” Your voice tight, your words rushed. You grab your coat and quickly brush my walls with your fingertips.

“Let’s go!” the police shout. “Move it! You can’t stay here.”

And you all scatter, slipping away into the city. Not detained, but not free.

Where are they supposed to go? I scream at the police as they pick up the items you’ve left behind—blankets, clothing—and shove them into plastic garbage bags. Where are any of them supposed to go? Bold for the first time in decades, I rear up from the shadows, flexing my walls and trembling my floors, screeching like metal wheels on metal tracks. But their flashlights pass straight through my long body, unaware and uncaring.

I reach deep inside myself and call out to the canal—not just to the waters, but to the new trench itself, wide and strong.

Hello! I call. Hello, I am still here! I need help!

The canal does not answer. Whether it is unable or simply unwilling to hear me, I cannot say. And I, alone, without my waters and trains, I can’t do a thing as the police leave.

My rocks twitch and heave. I feel as though my children have been torn from my arms. I’ve let myself grow accustomed to voices again, to bodies, to life, and now it’s all gone. I am not of use. I am not Erie. I am an empty space, holding nothing.

#

Many days pass before anyone comes back.

You come first, Prophet, creeping in alone like you had before, quiet and scared. When I greet you, you let out a short sob. “I wasn’t sure you’d still be here.”

I am here, I say, surprised. Where else could I go?

Others follow you, over subsequent nights—fewer than there were before. Far fewer. I extend myself through what remains of my once sturdy walls, probing beneath the city, attempting to find those who are missing, to see what befell them. But my reach is stunted: choked by concrete, hemmed by asphalt and tire. And in any case, there are far too many lost souls wandering the city for me to locate them all.

“They’ll find their way back,” you tell me. “The ones who can. The ones who need you will find you.”

Why would anyone need me? Once, perhaps, but now . . . now I am nothing.

“You’re not nothing!” you insist.

I could not help you when the police came. I couldn’t touch them. And if they come back . . .

“Oh, they’ll come back. They’ll wait a while, just until we feel safe, and then . . .” You shake your head. “They’ll never just let us be.”

Then why did you return? Why, when I cannot protect you?

“Look, Erie. No one’s protecting us. There’s nowhere we can go that’s safe. But for a little while, in between the raids, we feel at home here. I feel at home here.” You search the dark, and I swear you can see me—all of me. The way I was, and the way I am. “Don’t you want us here?”

Yes, I answer. It’s selfish of me. Even though I can’t save you, I don’t want you to go.

You lean back against the wall. “You were happy. When you were the canal.”

Yes. Yes, I was happy. I loved the canal.

“I’m sorry they moved it. I’m sorry they took that from you.”

Thank you. But . . . I stop and think, remembering. I was happy after the waters left, too. Here, with the iron tracks and the cars that screeched atop them, full of people. And I am happy now, too. With you, Prophet, and with the others.

“I’m glad I found you,” you say, your voice slurring with impending sleep. “I’m glad you’re here.”

With your eyes closed, you look like the boy you still ought to be. The creases in your face ironed out, your mouth soft, your thick curly hair cushioning your head. You breathe like a baby, deep into your belly. You are so very soft—so vulnerable to heat and cold, to puncture. I wish I could shield you, but all I have are my walls and floor: puddled with water, littered with trash. I shelter you within them, and keep the world at bay.

#

The police do come again, just like you warned me. Night after night, I’ve been expecting them, but even so, the lights are a shock. An invasion.

Once again, you all scramble, kicking up pebbles and glass in your haste. Once again, I rear up, roaring. And once again, the police stare straight through me, as if I don’t exist—and I might as well not. I am doomed to watch this unfolding over and over again, because I am nothing.

But I remember your voice, outraged and insistent: You’re not nothing!

Yes, I am.

You are not nothing!

Then what am I?

And as the police shove you aside, Prophet, as they shine their flashlights into your eyes, I know.

I called myself Erie, but I am not the lake. I am not the canal, nor the subway it left behind. If I am a spirit, it is of this: this trench, this tunnel. This means of connection.

This city.

I feel it then—the city center, trapped and forgotten, but still alive. Still teeming with people, still filled with want. And though I, too, have been cut apart and stunted, part of me remains: the aqueduct, erected out of mortar and brick, overlooking the river that tosses and crashes below. Water and earth. I have them still. But I have become more. I have always been more.

I am the people who operated the machines that dug me from the earth. The ones who carved the aqueduct into graceful arches, who greased the locks until they gleamed. Those who tiled the subway, creating underground mosaics, and those who now paint my walls. Who create beauty simply to reach out, to leave something behind for those who follow.

The runes on my walls make of me a temple. I am sacred, and powerful.

I stretch myself out, feeling my entire length for the first time in ages—feeling myself change once again. I am outgrowing this tunnel; I push through rock and soil, burrowing, nudging past concrete and rebar. Widening cracks. Breaking through.

I feel the cool waters of the Genesee, polluted and tasting of chemicals from factories long shuttered, but still flowing free. I smell the lilacs blooming on street corners, mixing with exhaust and cigarette smoke and the yeasty tang of beer brewing in giant vats. And along the sides of buildings—everywhere—is the art I recognize from my own walls. Decorating the city. Beautifying the decay. Saying, Don’t forget me. Saying, I was here.

I flex my walls and feel the city tremble. The police feel it, too; they falter, bracing themselves. But you, Prophet, you do not falter. You understand. You smile.

I scream, then: We are here! My voice no longer sounds like rust. I am footsteps and laughter. I am fires burning in the night. The percussive shaking of millions of cans of paint. I am decorated decay; I am written in the words of the city.

The tunnel shakes then, and as the police draw panicked lines with their flashlights, they see me. My legs threading through each duct, each power line. My eyes peering through every window. They hear the roar of water rushing through rock, trains thundering through tunnels. Oiled steel, electric sparks; cargo and factories and people calling out in welcome. They hear you, Prophet, you and the others, shouting with joy.

You are still shouting when the police flee, their cars speeding away. And I—whatever I am now—I can feel things start to shift within and around me. Stubborn weeds pushing through asphalt. Roads heaving with roots and frost.

I collapse into myself, exhausted and energized, as you lead everyone back inside. We are not safe—the police will be back again. But we are together, for now. We are not helpless. We are here.

I need a new name, I whisper to you.

“I do, too,” you whisper back.

We curl up together to sleep, all of us, arms and legs intertwined with the city itself. Creating our own network, our own connection. Our own, new entity, made from everything that came before: rock and water and brick and steel, paint and exhalations and words.

Together, we breathe, and the city breathes with us.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Jennifer Hudak is a speculative fiction writer fueled mostly by tea. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, F&SF, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. Originally from Boston, she now lives with her family in Upstate New York, where she teaches yoga, knits pocket-sized animals, and misses the ocean.

“Written on the Subway Walls,” © Jennifer Hudak, 2025.

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