Pink

There was a lot on the mind of Garrison Knight as he stood at the Lexington Market platform, waiting for the next train.

Always on the move, Garrison didn't often get any time to himself to think.  But today, the 9:06 Light Rail was five minutes late, so Garrison Knight thought about his entire life.

The pink hue of the hair ribbon was what caught Garrison's eye first.  Its floppy ends bobbed in time with the assent of the six-year-old girl, nodding her head in mirth at some funny joke that had slipped out of the puckered mouth of her teddy bear.  Her left hand held her mother's hand tightly.

Garrison had once had a daughter.  Well, he still had a daughter, for all he knew, though she hadn't wanted to see him for many years.  He had used to buy her hair ribbons for her birthday - a gift that became a father-daughter tradition.

That was before his job at the steel plant had forced a solo move to Sparrows Point.  "You're a shoo-in for promotion to line boss," Mr. Bellows had said.  Mr. Bellows had lied, as usual, but Garrison had found other sins to occupy his time.

Garrison's stomach muttered.  He had overslept and missed his morning meal.  Garrison ran a tight schedule, and making the morning train had meant listening to his stomach's running commentary.

The pink ribbon continued its airy dance.  Garrison had planned to keep up the annual tradition of hair-ribbon-buying well past the age at which hair ribbons stopped being cool.  A gesture of affection between father and daughter could not be defined by the laws of fashion.  But, last he had heard, his daughter was going to school in Oregon and Garrison didn't remember her address.  He didn't remember a lot of things these days, save for the mundane details pertaining to schedule.

A childish cry broke his concentration.  The ribbon had escaped from its nesting place and was spiraling towards the train tracks.  A single tear escaped the little girl's eye, but her mother held her back.

The ribbon alit, perilously, in the very center of the tracks.  Garrison looked at his watch, but it seemed to have stopped a long time ago, frozen at 7:48 a.m.  And then he broke his schedule.

On the train tracks, enveloped in a concrete canyon, Garrison could barely hear the shocked murmur of the confused crowd.  He bent down and grasped the ribbon.

The canyon shook.  People screamed.  A bright light shone directly into his eyes.  He couldn't see the ribbon any more.  Black.

Later on, a blurb in the next day paper would remark on the death of a homeless man at one of the stations of the Baltimore Light Rail.  The man had no identification and investigators couldn't understand what had prompted him to suddenly leap into the path of the oncoming train, instead choosing to classify the death a suicide.