Viv checked her phone for the subway map, opened in a browser tab. It was one of about a hundred browser tabs open, but now was not the time to clean them up. She pinched over to her part of Manhattan, the Upper West Side. A station stop was two blocks away. The orange line and the blue line both stopped there, the B and the C. She put her cold hands against the crate and pushed.
The animal inside started to make a little whimper.
“Hold it together, Stinky,” Viv said. “I’m trying to find somewhere warm for you.” The subways were heated, so for whatever brief period she’d be riding, it’d be out of the cold.
She reached the 72nd St. station and stopped flat. The entrance was just a staircase, leading down under the sidewalk. How was she supposed to get the crate down the stairs? There was no elevator. There was a second entrance across the street, but she could see that didn’t have an elevator either. How did people in wheelchairs use the subway?
Could she get this thing down the stairs by herself? Maybe, but with a really good chance of it banging down and opening and then there’s a dinosaur loose in the subway. A decent chance a good Samaritan might help her bring it down, but that wasn’t good either, since any fingers placed on this crate were in range of being bitten. Or clawed, or whatever Stinky did.
She took out her phone with her now-shivering hands, examining the map some more. Some stations had a little wheelchair icon by them. This station didn’t.
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OK, subways ran in straight lines. Every few blocks Central Park West had a different subway stop. One of those stops had to have elevator access. She followed the map up to the 81st St. stop. No wheelchair icon. 86th St., no icon. 96th St. 103rd St. 110th St. 116th St. Eventually there was one at 125th St., eight thousand away. Was that Harlem? Did she have to push a dinosaur all the way to Harlem?
Going south was a bit better: the next blue-orange stop with a wheelchair icon was 59th St. That was still a long distance. To the left was a different subway line entirely, the red line, with another 72nd St. station due west along Broadway. That was the 1, 2 and 3 trains. That was the closest, and thus the easiest way to getting warm.
Viv put the phone in her pocket and pushed west. In New York north-south blocks took one minute to walk (short blocks) and east-west blocks took five minutes (long blocks). She had several long blocks.
She passed brownstones and big apartment buildings and women pushing strollers with clear plastic coverings that kept their babies warm. Viv thought it’d be weird to live in New York with a baby. But anywhere with a baby was weird to Viv, who would like kids someday but was dating someone who wanted three kids before their first date. You had no idea how old fashioned he was.
An advantage to long blocks is fewer street crossings. At each one she dipped the crate down at the curb cut, waiting for the cars and delivery vans and a surprising number of bicycles with oven mitts taped to the handlebars to pass, then raced the danger box across the crosswalk before the light changed. Bicycles kept zipping at her as she was crossing, screaming for everyone to move out of their way.
A few strenuous minutes later she reached the 72nd St. 1-2-3 station, which was a glass palace that took up most of a block. How were some subway stops this ornate and others just holes in the sidewalk? And why were some trains numbers and some trains letters? Viv didn’t know, she just pushed the crate inside the warmth of the lobby. She didn’t even need to pay the fare to get on the elevator.
