It was summer, the heat steaming off the subway tracks, piss reeking in the corners, and the air as thick as gravy. The weeks all seemed to melt into one another like bars of chocolate left out in the sun. I drive a limo most days and wear a uniform that’s all stiff around the collar and a little too tight around the thighs. The only day that’s different is Monday, my day off: cool Budweiser in the park and hot dogs in stale buns.

It was on a Monday, early in the morning that the cops came to tell me the news. They rang again and again on the doorbell. I was sitting on my bed inspecting my toenails, which have grown blue and curled. I’m not looking so good anymore. My hairline is eroding and somehow my voice is always hoarse these days. I had shaved though, and trimmed my mustache so I was ready - in a way.

My sister ran away from home when she was quite young, and was never seen again. Some said she had been committed to a psychiatric ward, while others said she had been put in jail for some kind of crime, but nobody seemed to know what. I could not remember her at all. I had seen a photograph once in a shoe box my mother kept under the bed. My sister had my mother’s skin – darkish, Puerto Rican and was scowling into the camera while shielding her eyes. "Loca," my mother said, shaking her head, and then again, "loca!" I knew this meant my sister was crazy and that I should ask no more questions.

The cops told me that my sister had dressed in white and waited for a Brooklyn bound A train. The train catapulted out of its tunnel and screeched alongside the platform. It blew by the people at the end, raced to the people up front. That very morning my sister had buried her best friend in the world: a rat named Gabriel. My sister was forty-seven years old; fifteen years older than myself and not quite right in the head.?

I paid for my sister’s funeral. I was her only living relative and I felt it was my duty. Hardly anybody came, save a disheveled-looking man who sat snoring at the back of the room and an old bag lady, and a West Indian woman who knelt and babbled on and on about Jesus. She was there when it happened she told me. She had seen my sister hit the tracks. Dressed in white, my sister had walked barefoot to the edge of the platform at 59^th Street. My sister was in a closed casket of course – the cheapest I could find. And there were no flowers.

There was only one fan in the funeral parlor and my armpits and back grew wet with sweat. I tried to grieve, but found I could not. My sister had committed suicide, which my mother would have called a terrible sin. My sister was buried in the Bronx, in the same cemetery as my parents. My mother had died of cancer, and my father had drunk himself to death.

I was glad that I was not asked to identify the body. There was nothing to identify. It was mangled beyond recognition. The police had known that this mass of flesh and bone was my sister only because of the papers, the things she had left behind. My sister had been living in the tunnels for almost five years. In the summer it was brutally hot underground, and in the winter so cold and damp that even the rats complained. My sister had run away from a psych ward in Yonkers and had gone underground somewhere in Manhattan. She was one of the "mole people" – one of the homeless living beneath the tunnels, the tracks, the carcasses of abandoned trains. She moved so softly that no one ever heard her come. She stole from transit cops, MTA employees: a sandwich here, some money there – and no one ever seemed to notice until long after she was gone. Sometimes however, she let herself be seen, and the men recognized her face, her wild eyes. They chased after her then, shouted and called her names – but she always slipped away – just in time.

My mother had a scar on her earlobe from when my sister had yanked at her earring and a scar on her ankle where my sister had bitten her. My mother had stretch marks on her belly from me, she said, but mostly from my sister. My sister had never been normal, always in trouble. Always loca. There had never been any hope, my mother said, never for my sister. Sometimes, when I was small I had nightmares about my sister, that she would come at me, climb in through the window gnashing her teeth. I dreamed that she would wrap her hands around my neck and wring it like a chicken’s. But then when I grew older, the dreams stopped, and then it was hard to believe she had ever existed.

The cops gave me my sister’s diary. Her writing is big and loopy, like a child’s and the pages are all smeared and smudged with soot. She refers to the police as the Blue Puppets. It seems that they have come down to look for her. She has been saving this white outfit – this remnant from the hospital for her Death Day. She says the trains are Snakes and that they are a part of the Mistress Plan, which I can only assume are the details of her suicide. She often speaks of Gabriel the rat, her only companion: ?

Only Gabriel knows the truth of this Mechanical Planet. Sometimes he runs up and around just to hear Them scream. Skwee! Gabriel laughs and bleeds on the tracks. Beings and non-beings – so. Gabriel and I. Sometimes the Blue Puppets come to the dark tunnels looking. They won’t find us. Skwee. Gabriel came to me last night when the Snakes were gone. He says I must hurry. I must be ready for the Alpha Snake. I must quick-up the Plan. Skwee, skwee, skwee, he said. Blood on his tail. The Blue Puppets came down and tried to hurt him. Fuckers and facists. Again they came with lights and dogs. Yelling out fuckerfacistly. They are scared of dark and all Gabriel’s kind. I see them look around all jumpy. Something touches them and they hit the air and yell louder. I am afraid too. Fear writes on my heart with sharp stick-pencils. One time the Blue Puppets hit me and I woke up in a strange Topside place they call Shelter. I cried and I spat. I touched my fur and there was blood there. They told me I smelled bad and gave me big blue pills to make me Forget what they did. I run, run, run from the Blue Puppets. I follow Gabriel because he knows this place. We know the Snakes, the flying cats, the bats in the Ballroom. Sometimes the birds come too but Gabriel says they must go.

My sister is the self-proclaimed Princess of Track Towns, the Queen of the Underground, the Mistress of the Snakes. Gabriel vanishes frequently into the wires, into dingy little holes that could never fit a human. And sometimes it is days before Gabriel pays my sister a visit:

Where O Where has my Gabriel gone? Still the Blue Puppets come like clockwork with nightsticks and round white lights.

My sister speaks of executing the Plan. She talks about putting on her white outfit. She says that she is ready to make her Sacrifice, her final surrender to the Snakes.

I saw death this morning, and it was Gabriel. All bloody and split. The Blue Puppets killed him and now it is the end. I wash the body with my tears. I wash my face in rainwater. Now it is time. Now, now it is. A Snake Alpha – Omega.

O. O? O!

I don’t know what to think, what to feel, how to bury this sister of mine. And listening to the West Indian lady’s interminable chant, I wonder why I do. Why I am.

My sister’s casket is gone, sunk deep into the ground, and I have ridden home on the train. I find myself walking away from station under a bloated moon. It is not cold, but I shiver, and then I bow my head and fold my arms over my chest. The moon is alive, I think, and it’s eating me up.

Edited by Jim Chandler & Haze McElhenny