Confessions is a series of fiction and photography by Samuel Shopp and Nick Henderson. Nick Henderson is a photographer with the Mason Gross School of the Arts and his complete set can be viewed here.
July 5, 10:22 AM:
Eight year old Delilah Winters peered over the yellow edge of the train platform. She laid down on her stomach and stretched out a palm to feel the metal rail. It was cool, hard, and dead straight. No one was really watching her. Her cheek was pressed against the blistered yellow concrete, and she could feel, with her eyes closed, the uneasy rumbling of the train tracks.
Caspian Deva swayed a little by the door of a moving train. Except for the conductor, he was the only one standing between compartments. Caspian’s 
eyes were closed. The conductor could see his mouth moving. Breathless incantations parted his lips.
“Alright, kid?” the conductor asked.
“I don’t know,” Caspian said.
“You don’t look alright,” the conductor said, “and I know when a guy ain’t lookin’ alright.”
A man swayed under the bridge by the station. He made eye contact with a college boy who had just gotten off the train. He lurched forward and held his hand out, palm towards God:
“Hey son. I normally wouldn’t do this, but you look like a good person. I can tell by the way you’re stopping and talking to someone like me, you’re a good guy.”
The college boy watched the man with concern and nodded his head.
“I was trying to get to Rahway, but I fell asleep and missed my stop. I’m short 35 cents for the ride back. Maybe you could help me out?”
The college boy dug through his pockets for a few quarters.
“I could tell you were a good guy. Just looking I could tell,” said the man under the bridge, looking at the quarters in the palm of his hand, “Hey kid, is this all you got?”
Caspian Deva opened his eyes to the middle aged conductor. The tchik-a-tchik-a-tchik-a of the train seemed to be getting faster and Caspian sensed that they were headed towards a revelation.
“How do you know?” he asked the conductor.
“Know what?”
“How do you know when a guy ain’t lookin’ alright? I mean, how do you know?”
“Well, by watchin’ ‘em. That’s how you know.”
Nancy Pyle, former director of the NSA’s surveillance program PRISM, ducked behind her upside-down copy of the Wall Street Journal. She shivered in her big parka coat. She was talking to herself.
“Madame Pyle, do you remember our office? In Fort Meade? We used to drive down the Patuxent Freeway at 6am and cross the little river just as the sun was coming up? Do you remember we could see our building from the Freeway? The walls were big black mirrors? We could see all the cars, real early in the morning, so the amber sun was reflected too? We were reflected too? In those enormous black mirrors? Obsidian mirrors?”
“I remember! I do, I do remember, I do! The black mirrors were so shiny, so shiny, black and shiny like bossy black shoes! I do! Shiny, watching, reflecting, black, black, shiny!”
“We always felt sortof nauseous coming down the Freeway in those days. It felt unnatural. We thought something so black should only be able to absorb light, but it reflected us so clearly.”
“Yeah yeah! We felt watched! Watched! We felt watched! ”
Delilah Winters played and stretched her fingers to touch the cool metal rail.
“Delilah! Get away from there!”
Caspian Deva shook hands with the conductor.
“I can’t watch people like you can. They watch me back. It’s fine at first, until we make eye contact. They see my eye and something terrible happens. It’s in my eye.”
“I understand you kid. It took me years to learn how to relate to people. But you’re going to be alright. I mean just looking at you, I can tell—”
“—you’re a good guy, so maybe you won’t mind—”
“—watching us, watching us, watching us—”
“—I take my eyes off you for one minute! Sit down, Delilah, and don’t move.”
Caspian stepped off the train onto a crowded New Brunswick platform. A girl ran haphazard along the yellow Danger Paint. Marla Winters sat on a bench, watching birds dart across electrical wires. Looking down, she felt a name and a memory catch in her throat.
“Oh— ” she said, tremulous and overwhelmed, “—Cas.”
Her eyes had met his for merely a moment, but Marla saw herself in them. 20 years ago, she had planted a tree with a packet of seeds she had been given in Mrs. Mumble’s 3rd grade class with the dream of holding sticky summer peaches with her bare hands, plucking barrels of ripe fruit, selling them on the street corner with a handmade sign, learning to bake a cobbler in the July heat, checking on it every 2 minutes, and looking up at her Mother as the oven’s flames forged a bond to last the winter. Marla waited patiently the 2-4 years indicated by the seed packet, but 6 years later the tree had produced only meager, sour peaches that refused to ripen for anyone but God Himself. High school came and went, and Marla Winters had entirely forgotten about the dream of a warm summer cobbler being formed by her Mother’s steady hand. Her eyes brimmed with visions of bitter peaches, and mascara ran in ugly streaks down her face.
She wondered “why, why, why.”
Caspian Deva took the bus home, and Delilah Winters went unwatched down the yellow painted edge.
Samuel Shopp
PC: Ed Weisgerber, Wikipedia Commons