Belly-button The dirty subway stairs first crashed painfully into her knees and calfs, then into her hips, and later, as she slid fast enough for the people behind her to just pretend to try and catch her, into her ribs. She tried to grab the handrails but, as her bruises would prove the next day, didn’t reach it. She tried to think when was the last time she’d fallen. Falling only seemed to exist for her in her dreams and in children’s games. She remembered dreaming of falling, but not falling in real life; she used to think those dreams meant something, until she realized everyone had dreams of falling and that the only dreams that were exclusively hers were either those where the elevator in her building tried to kill her in several gruesome ways. She remembered almost falling off a boat once, as a kid, one of the many times her father took her and her brother to Mexico. She must have been about thirteen or fourteen, and she was sick of that scruffy-looking prick she called her brother. He was older than her; not old enough to be one of those brothers that are more like a relaxed version of your dad, but old enough to fall for one of her friends during his senior year and get heartbroken to the point of depression. He was a good brother, but at the time of the boat incident he must have been fourteen or fifteen. He had spent the entire trip making fun of her belly-button. He kept saying it was actually a gigantic wart that proved she was a witch. After she told their dad about that he started the rumour that the handsome boy from the room next door to theirs had gotten her pregnant. The truth was that she would have done anything to have gotten pregnant by the handsome boy next door, but the fact that she wasn’t only made her even madder at her scrawny brother whom she had actually seen kissing the handsome boy’s sister. Evidently, she was also very pretty, she remembered thinking that family must have had good genes. Her brother was on deck, wearing an old captain’s cap that had used to be too big for his head just a year before, but now fit him quite well, and her father was by the wheel talking in what she then assumed was gibberish, which would later turn out to be Spanish, to one of the many short, mustached men that were part of the crew. She, sick of her brother’s constant bickering, was wearing a huge shirt over her entire body that made her look like she was actually wearing a nightgown, came running past her brother and swiftly took the cap from her brother’s head. He came running right after her and started screaming about her being a bloated-belly-buttoned monster, and how he hoped that whatever was growing insider her was a tumor so she’d die. At about that moment their father had come down after hearing all the racket, and with his deep voice said: “Kids!”. She hadn’t been able to stop. The nightgown-shirt made her trip as she heard her father’s voice and she felt herself losing all balance and heading straight to the handrail that prevented her from falling into the water, but, more importantly right into the boat’s engines. Her brother ran and tried to catch her; by the time he got to the handrail she was already halfway over it. He held her legs and pulled her. She fell on top of him as the shirt and the captain’s hat fell into the ocean. The event was as traumatizing as it may have sounded and she had chosen never to go back to Mexico, or to the ocean. She had chosen to live only in places where navigation was more of an occupational hazard or a hobby, and less of an obligation. She had chosen New York, because she liked the idea of being underwater but being completely in control. She loved the idea of going across the East and Hudson Rivers via subway. She felt powerful. Today she had lost all of her power. She had slipped off the snowy and muddy subway stairs. Snow. It was her fault. Water had, once more beat her. She had fallen sideways and felt her pride hurt more than the hard rubble against her skin. She, as most New Yorkers, had grown used to the summer and wore only a jacket over her normal sweater and t-shirt attire. The jacket was open, and, as she fell sideways, it did little to protect her from the blunt edges of the stairway. She wasn’t in pain when she finally hit the tiled floor of the station, she felt a bit jaded and confused, but she soon realized she had to pick herself up as soon as possible as to avoid any further humiliation. It was then she realized that in the fall, the stairs had rolled up her clothes, and she now lay there showing her belly-button to the entire station. She stayed there, full of pride, until a young police officer quite rudely asked her pick herself up.