Hans and Gretchen
by Terena Elizabeth Bell
Once upon a time, there was a set of twins named Hans and Gretchen who lived on New York’s Upper East Side. Not the Yorkville part of the Upper East Side where the poor and old people lived, but Carnegie Hill off Park Avenue. They lived in two 735 square-foot apartments that were side by side in a doorman building their parents bought for them after they dropped out of Columbia.
They did not leave uptown often. When they did, they took the family car, driven by a man named Jose, and — when Jose was unavailable — a cab.
On the morning this story begins, their mother had booked the driver and, alas, no cabs were in sight. It was UN Week, so most of the streets were closed off, an early fall crispness in the air. The twins were heading into Brooklyn — too far to walk — to see a choreoplay by a friend from Dimes Square.
And so against their better judgement, Gretchen and Hans went down — down — down — into the subway system.
East 86th was a treacherous stop and the twins were unused to public transit. The stairs were uneven — asphalt with cracks — Gretchen almost turned a heel. Hans kept looking back, saying, “We should have brought less cash,” microdosing on his dab pen, the smell of synthetic creating a trail that could be seen quite a distance behind them. The smoke earned some looks from passers-by, but of course the twins failed to notice.
The train didn’t come when they wanted it to, as the subway does not work on command. They were forced to wait as the clock on the wall counted down a stalled arrival. The time held and it held and it hung in the air and then the clock simply froze. “This doesn’t bode well,” Gretchen said to Hans and Hans shrugged and said it’d all be alright — it was his idea, you see, to take public transit to begin with.
He’d long been wanting to try it. Hans had met a girl on an app a few weeks before who’d said that she took the train to work, something that had worried the twins’ mother who told her son, “Be careful she’s not out for our money.” But lots of people took the subway — the system was the great equalizer — and Hans had wanted to prove to himself as much as to his mother not that straphanging was unindicative of class, but that the girl he liked was not a gold-digger.
“Let’s do a selfie for Insta,” he told his sister, then saw she’d already posted. Indeed, now that they were finally onboard, the car had a certain flair: Its hard, plastic seats were a colorful kitsch, Gretchen recording a short dance between rows. “Don’t touch the pole,” Hans said.
A woman reading a book looked up, muttering “tourists” beneath her breath — and perhaps they were: The two were travelers visiting for pleasure, strangers within their own realm.
At 59th St, a stop along the 4/5 line, everything took a turn for the worse: The conductor made an announcement they could not understand and everyone emptied the car. The woman with her book told Gretchen, “Offloading,” trying to be helpful, “That means everybody off. Even you,” when the twins did not move.
It wasn’t that they didn’t want to comply, but that this new station was so dark and so crowded and so nasty. There were workers in masks and teenagers on their phones, a dog in an Ikea bag. A man was strung out with a needle in his arm; people stepped around him as though this were sane. Someone had recently defecated and there was no staff to clean it. The sight of it all made Gretchen so tired that she deeply longed to sit down. But she couldn’t, some homeless mound asleep on the bench, stretched out across all three seats.
“This better be one heck of a play,” she said, looking directedly at Hans.
At a distance was a migrant with a baby on her back. Strapped in a blanket, it bounced and bounced. The child couldn’t have been more than two months old, its face a wood-branch lean. “Cha-co-lah-tay,” the migrant said, in an accent like Jose’s, “cha-co-lah-tay,” again and again.
“Hans,” Gretchen said, “she’s bothering me. Make her go away,” but the woman kept asking, her basket brimming over, filled with Kinder and Twix: “Cho-co-lah-tay, chicle,” she said.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” Hans told his sister, “No gracias,” without a smile, the twins looking every way they could, as the baby began to scream. It screamed and it screamed and it screamed some more, then an older child came up to soothe it. “Cha-co-lah-tay,” said the mother, more desperate than before, “two dolla, two dolla, my friend.”
Gretchen clung tight to her Hermès bag, as the older child tugged the bottom of her dress.
Around them, the platform was filled with people, each individual another swell, and the twins realized for the first time in their lives, no one was coming to help. They were alone in the crowd, all of these people in their very own worlds, not caring the least about theirs. “Help,” Gretchen whispered, then “Help,” she screamed, finally getting some looks. But looks were not rescue, no one gave a damn, her only salvation was herself.
“Cha-co-lah-tay,” the woman pleaded, as the throng pressed on, even more awaiting now than before, so many pressing, a platform of bodies, radiating grime and heat, all of these bodies pressing and pushed, pushing against one another. The baby bounced and she bounced and Gretchen cried, “Hans!” her brother pulled from her by the sway.
“Get away,” she begged the woman one last time, Gretchen unable to breathe. They’d been in the system for far too long, longer than anyone ought to take.
The wind, the wind, the heaven-born wind rushed in from an arriving train.
Gretchen pushed. It had all been too much to bear. And oh, how the woman began to howl such a long and terrible scream, the baby knocked loose of its blanket and thrown on that wind, its body smashed dead by that train.
Terena Elizabeth Bell is a fiction writer. Her short story collection, Tell Me What You See (Whiskey Tit), was named one of the “best books of the century (so far)” by New York Society Library. Her debut novel, Recursion, is forthcoming September 2027 with Sagging Meniscus. A Sinking Fork, Kentucky native, she lives in New York. Get one of her stories delivered to your inbox every month by subscribing here.