People who have lived in New York for at least a few years tend to develop a particular sensitivity to subway cues. When it’s rush hour and the doors open in front of you to reveal a suspiciously empty subway car, wise commuters will jog down the platform to the next set of doors before they close, or wait for the next train. A vacant car during peak hours suggests either an issue of temperature or an issue of smell, and getting two seats to yourself isn’t worth putting up with either one of those problems.

This morning I was tricked into stepping onto a stinktrain before realizing my mistake, as the car wasn’t totally empty - it was just that everyone was bunched down at one end, and the people that got on at my station were already rushing to fill the available seats, so there weren’t those vast expanses of orange seating that usually warn me off. But almost immediately I was hit with an overpowering, almost Lovecraftian stench and joined everyone else in rushing to the crowded end of the car.

What was odd was that there wasn’t an identifiable source - usually there’s a single person or substance at the center of the stink radius, but not this time. Either whatever it was had fallen under a seat or it was in fact the residual odor of something that had recently been removed. I shudder to think what could have stunk so powerfully that it affected an entire carful of commuters even in its absence, but I suppose that’s something I’ll never know.