Blast | November 06, 2025

Steeped in the divisive cues of status, Emily Neuberger’s “Under the River” traps a group of New Yorkers in a subway car at midnight and explores what we owe to ourselves, our loved ones, and those we’ll never meet again.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

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UNDER THE RIVER

Early in my relationship with my husband, he said something to me that was so right I felt as if he’d reached between my eyes and placed his fingertip on the very bottom of my psyche. I’d been seeing someone else at the time who I thought more exciting. But then my husband, who until then I’d thought of as the safe option, kissed me goodbye after a date, then leaned over and whispered this endearment in my ear. It was a kind word, unsexual, but it made me feel exactly what I’d always hoped to feel. At the time it felt like there was a lot of negotiation left to do—I remember a weeklong upset started by a sofa—but in hindsight it was just logistics. I already knew that together we’d find a renewable passion, based more on how we related to each other than ephemeral desire. 

I was thinking about this as we bumped along the subway home one night. I was tired, letting the train’s inertia rock me into the warm pillow of his body. We’d just been to a movie and my husband wanted to discuss the cinematography. I made the appropriate noises, my eyes closed, my cheek sweating against his rain jacket. Moments like this, when we both performed our marital duties separately and without complaint, made me lonely. I had once wanted love to mean alignment, a constant miracle of coincidence, but it had turned out to mean he helped enable my desires and then waited patiently for his turn. More and more lately, our desires skirted off each other. But we upheld the terms of our marital contract. I let him talk and he let me not listen and neither of us got what we wanted but we had no cause for complaint. 

The film had been about a woman leaving one long monogamous relationship for another, then finding new and equivalent problems. It made me think of the promise I found in his endearment. I remember visualizing our whole life in front of us after he spoke to me that way. Our life now looked little like the one I’d pictured. 

We were in the tunnel beneath the East River when the train halted. I sat up, my tiredness blinking out with the lights. My husband straightened too, searching for a way to be useful. He was a dutiful man. If we lived in olden times, he’d always be running off to fetch water to put out a neighbor’s fire. 

I provided a job for him by reaching for his hand. I didn’t like being under the river, and especially not at a standstill. I could smell it, claylike and cool, and tried not to picture water flooding the antique tunnel, bursting through the wet stones on either side of us and filling the car in one terrible second. I wonder if the pressure would be enough to kill us or if we’d have to wait to drown. 

“You okay?” he asked. 

“Mmm.” 

He squeezed my hand. 

Usually, I thought, the trains stopped near the stations, held off by the dispatcher to balance traffic. I’d never, in my twenty New York years, stopped in the middle of the river. I didn’t like to be reminded of how unnatural the city was, how much we all depended on life support. 

The train car opened at the far end. A woman in baggy dark clothing walked through. She had long, white, gnarled hair and a thin face with a long nose, like a child’s drawing of a witch. She looked as though she weighed less than one hundred pounds, and when she came close, there was a smell, one that I knew but had only encountered the faintest whiffs of on my own body after camping trips. A smell of this potency took weeks to mature, disturbing not only for its unpleasantness but for the reminder of what was possible. 

I watched her because she helped me banish thoughts of drowning. She walked until she was standing near my husband and me. We were in the middle of an old car with orange seats and shoe scuffs crisscrossing the floor. It was full, midnight on a Friday. She looked around. Most people ignored her. Then she said, in a thin high voice loud enough to make me jump, “I’ve been raped!” 

No one reacted. I looked around. People stared into their phones despite, I assumed, the lack of service. A woman in purple scrubs rested her head against the window, seemingly asleep. 

“I’ve been raped!” she repeated, louder. 

My husband looked at me, as if I should tell him what to do. I shook my head. 

I looked around, as I always did in moments like this, for potential allies. There was a handsome man sitting opposite us, mid-thirties, in a beautiful gray suit. He blinked up at the woman as if her cry had woken him from a nap. There was a young man on my other side, clutching a program from a Broadway show, his thin arms the color of lima beans, and I felt that if things became strange in this subway car, this boy was my husband’s and my responsibility. 

The woman was turning on the spot, a hideous music box ballerina. She repeated her plea at everyone she faced until she reached me. 

“Help me,” she said. “Please.” 

There was a look in her eyes of aimless, overwhelming fear that suggested to me that the rape had really happened, but some time ago, maybe years, and yet lived perpetually at the front her mind. 

Across, the handsome man used long fingers to pick pods out of his ears. 

I leaned forward and spoke slowly. “Please wait,” I said. “At the next station, we will get you some help.” As I said this, I wondered how I could keep this promise; the police seemed a betrayal. I checked my phone without hope, and it had no service. 

“I called for help,” she said, now in collaboration. “I stopped the train.” 

Suddenly the other riders began to pay attention. I watched the woman with the shopping bags raise her head. “You what?” 

“I stopped the train.” 

The beautiful man across from us entered the conversation. He had dark, thick hair and a well-shaped face with visible bones, and beautiful hands which he had clasped together, his elbows on his knees. “You pulled the emergency brake?” 

His voice was soft, low, steady; the kind of voice meant to be in charge of things. I leaned back against the seat. My husband put his hand on my knee and squeezed. 

“I called for help,” she said again.  

He closed his eyes at the frantic attack of her voice, then breathed and opened them again. 

“Did you pull this?” He indicated the emergency brake inside the box. “In another car?” 

“Yes.” She nodded, seeming relieved. “The cops are coming and they’ll catch him.” 

I was thinking of a project I did in the seventh grade during a unit on Chicago homelessness. I remember reading an account from someone living on the streets who said that the hardest part was how no one ever looked at him. He said he felt like he was trapped behind glass, invisible and silenced, watching everyone but unable to reach them. I wondered if the woman felt like that. If she’d pulled the alarm to make everyone see her. 

Meanwhile I heard my husband swear under his breath. Not angry; resigned. He knew before me what was about to happen. He was good at things like that, practical things. I worried more, but he was more cautious. 

The woman in the scrubs spoke up. “Oh sweet Jesus, we’ll be here all night.” 

My husband wiped his palms on his jeans. 

“They’re going to get him,” she said. “They’ll catch him.” 

“Oh, shut up,” the scrubs woman called. She was on the far end of the car, and sprawled against her seat, looking as if her muscles had clocked out for the evening and it was all she could to keep herself from puddling on the floor. “I need to get home.” 

The damsel wailed. 

Several more voices joined in, telling her to be quiet. 

“I worked today,” a woman said, shopping bags taking up the area in front of her seat and several around her. “Some one of us have to work.” 

The man across from us leaned forward. He had a beautiful watch, which highlighted his well-made wrist. He spoke low. He rubbed his palms together in agitation. “Someone hurt you?” 

“Yes,” she said. I could hear the relief in her voice. “Yes, someone hurt me. He attacked me.” 

“Just now?” 

“Yes.” 

“On this train?” 

“Yes!” 

He was looking at her carefully, one corner of his mouth raised up. “Tell me what happened.” 

My stomach began to hurt. 

I looked at my husband. I didn’t want to say anything someone else could hear, but I looked at him, because I felt that the man shouldn’t be asking this. 

I hoped to find my husband looking blearily off, unworried. But he was frowning at the man. My husband did not like men like this, men for whom the world bent. He, who had to work to earn women’s esteem, resented them. I hoped he was just biased, that whatever made him frown was his own insecurity. But the man’s stillness in this atmosphere made my stomach feel oily. 

She seemed confused by his question, made almost more afraid under the attention. “You want to know?” 

The beautiful man nodded. He had large dark eyes and thick lashes which, I thought, probably got him a lot of attention when he was a little boy. My mother always called boys’ thick eyelashes a waste. 

“He attacked me.” She sounded nervous now. 

“Who attacked you?” There was a small scold in his voice, as if her agitation was a disappointment. 

“The man. The big man.” She was holding up her skirt in her hands like a child, up around her belly button, worrying the fabric between her hands.  

I felt something in my throat then. More people had started to join in yelling at the woman. 

“It’s midnight, bitch,” the woman in scrubs said. “I worked all day.” 

My brain could no longer detect the smell of the river, but the air in the car was cool. I rubbed my prickling arms and leaned in to my husband. “I’m so glad I don’t have to pee.” 

“I’d hold up my jacket between cars.” But he was still watching the scene in front of us. The woman was rocking back and forth now. She no longer turned to look at the rest of us but kept her gaze locked on the well-dressed man as if he had bewitched her. 

“He attacked me,” she said. 

“That is interesting,” the man said, his face serene on hers, “but it doesn’t make sense.” 

“He did.” She rocked. “I don’t like you.” 

My heart began to pound at this. But then, I told myself, this woman was not an animal, or else, no more than I was; she did not have preternatural abilities to sense character. 

The man shook his head sadly, as if he wanted to help her, but could not. “I’m just trying to find out what happened.” 

“You’re bad. You’re bad.” 

She was just afraid, I thought. Likely, she was paranoid. 

He tensed and released his hand. “See, it doesn’t add up.” 

The woman didn’t speak. His response—his very engagement with her—confused her more. I watched her clavicles, brittle as pencils, rise and fall. 

The man smiled at her, a gentle curve of his mouth, and spoke low in a lover’s murmur. 

“You are a disgusting, dirty, flea-infested, rancid low-life,” he said. “No one would rape you.” 

My breath caught. My husband put his hand on my knee as if for balance. Neither of us looked at each other, but I could feel him wanting to. 

The boy beside me crumpled his theater program. 

The woman whimpered as if she’d been hit in the stomach. 

“Hey,” my husband said. I felt a jump in my heart. 

But then, unaware of any of this, two girls, nineteen or twenty, on one end of the train reached their own breaking point. They were holding onto the pole, birds of paradise with long, artificially colored hair in bright boots and shiny short skirts. They kept their sunglasses on and one yelled, “Get off the train, bitch!” then burst out laughing. The other nudged her friend and added, “You fucking crazy cunt!” They then turned to each other, hands over their mouths, and laughed, bending at the waist, proud of themselves. They reminded me of playing ding dong ditch as a child, doing something bad and running away as fast as I could. 

This seemed to rouse the scrubs lady more, and the woman with the shopping bags, who continued to lay back in their seats and shout in resigned tones about the work they have to do, the families waiting for them. 

“The train won’t move faster if you keep saying it,” I muttered. The boy with the program glanced at me, his forehead shining with sweat, and gave a little nod. I again felt a maternal responsibility for him. I pictured my husband and me sheltering him during a car-wide fight, a baby chick huddled between us. He was probably a foot taller than me but looked too young to be allowed. 

My husband was transfixed on the woman. His hand was digging into my knee, and I put mine over his. He loosened his grip at once and glanced at me in apology. 

“I hate this,” he breathed in my ear. 

“What happens when they pull the emergency brake?” I asked him. He tended to know things like this. But he shrugged. 

At that moment, the opposite train door opened and the conductor walked in. I was embarrassed to feel comforted by the uniform. As soon as he entered the car, he pulled the focus away from the woman, and the passengers began to yell at him instead. 

“I have to get home.” 

“It’s past midnight!” 

“Crazy woman pulled the brake.” 

He held out his hands, palms out, in the center of the train. “All right everyone, let’s take a breath.” 

I obeyed literally. This is something my husband would have laughed at once, when he thought everything I did was adorable. But now he was still watching the scene with that crease between his brows. 

“I’ve been raped,” the woman told the conductor. “I’ve been raped on this train.” 

The well-dressed man stood up then. His pants creased perfectly where his hip broke into his leg, and they draped down as he stood in a way that told me the fabric was expensive. He walked over to the conductor and offered his hand. 

“She’s confused,” he said gently. “When can we get a move on?” 

The conductor gave this man a strange look before he reached for the radio on his belt. He turned his back on the man and called in the cops. 

The woman had started to whimper, one thin sound, high pitched as a tea kettle approaching boil. 

The conductor watched all of us for a moment after he delivered his message, his hand on the belted radio, and then slowly backed toward the door. I watched him calculate whether he should stay and then decide that he didn’t want to be near any of us. I watched the doors close behind him with envy. 

My husband squeezed my hand. “Want to go?” 

The well-dressed man did not return to his seat. Instead, he paced the small space between the doors and the pole, walking around the woman in tight, angry circles. 

“Maybe,” I said. I did not want to leave this woman with this man. “No.” 

My husband nodded. I squeezed his hand. I felt gratitude then, for his goodness, for his inability to leave this stranger. 

At the end of the train, near the doors the conductor had just disappeared through, there was another couple. They were turned toward each other, clasping hands, and talking. While I watched, the woman laughed at something, angling her head back, her neck going long and curved. He kept his eyes on her face, watching her laugh, until she surfaced and he pulled her against him and kissed her. I wondered if they’d been together a short time, and that was why they could focus on their own company amid this tension. I hoped so. 

Suddenly the train lurched into movement. My husband put his arm around my shoulders as if this was something we had achieved together which deserved celebration. I remembered my earlier anxiety about the river, and leaned back, relieved, until we reached the lights in the tunnel that indicated we were approaching High Street. Then we stopped once more. 

This time, there was no hesitation before the chorus of dismay. Everyone—the shopping bag woman, the woman in her scrubs, the girls on their night out—groaned their frustration, all toward the woman with the white hair, who was clutching the pole in her thin hand, her shoulders trembling. By now, my husband had closed his eyes, murmuring under his breath, and I knew he was counting. He did this during unpleasant situations when he had no control. In traffic, long lines, even sometimes when I was angry with him. I had started to hate this management technique. Now I appreciated it. We all felt anger. How lovely that he expressed it through a whispered series of numbers. 

The well-dressed man did not yell. Instead he resumed talking to the woman in his low, sweet voice. I tried to tune him out. I did not want to hear the river of hatred emitting from his mouth. He frightened me in a way the real river never could in its amoral power. This man, this lovely man, harbored an anger far more frightening than random disasters. I realized there was a much worse way to die than by water. I pictured his man over me as he killed me. I wondered whether he had wanted to do something like that to someone. I imagined wanting to kill someone. I felt an inward shrivel at the idea of piercing someone else’s flesh. 

Quietly—but not so quietly that no one could hear, in fact, the two people nearest this man were doing an excellent job of ignoring him, reading their muted phones—he told this woman why she was worthless, why no one would believe her if she ever did go to the police, because no man would ever touch her, let alone have sex with her, because she was old, because she smelled, because she was worthless, because she was nothing. He said all this while clinging to the pole, stooped over her, his mouth near her ear, her gnarled white hair tickling his chin. She was nothing, he said. Nothing. 

He finished this diatribe by raising one of his beautiful hands in my direction. “You say someone raped you,” he said, his nose wrinkling in performed disgust. “But she is right here.” 

My husband reached for me then, his arm crossing my body like a seatbelt. I took his wrist in my hand and pushed him away, gently. 

I swallowed. My voice, when it came out, shook. “How dare you.” 

The beautiful man’s dark eyes flicked to me. There was no apology there, only the knowledge that he was caught, a child forced to swallow his disrespectful remark. He looked back to the woman. “I only meant, there are nice women here. Why would anyone choose you?” 

I could feel my husband’s anguish now like heat coming off his body; some mixture of male pride and genuine fear, his natural hatred of violence bumping against the man’s spew. 

“If he touches her,” my husband breathed into my ear, barely moving his lips, “I have to stop him.” 

I hadn’t considered that. The thought of violence felt distant until he voiced it aloud. Now I realized the only reason I hadn’t stopped the man was because I was afraid of him.  

The boy next to me had folded his program into an accordion, the ink breaking at the creases, which had become fuzzy and soft under his sweaty fingers. 

“He won’t,” I said, though I didn’t believe this. 

My husband stood then. I could tell he was afraid by the set of his jaw. I would be surprised to learn if he’d ever hit anyone, even as a child. But he grasped the pole, standing between the woman and the well-dressed man. He then nodded at his empty seat. 

The woman looked confused. 

“Sit,” he said. “Please.” 

She was trembling, but she obeyed. I hated how much I wanted to move once she was near me. The smell was dreadful. She was shaking very hard. 

The well-dressed man was watching my husband now. His face was still but there was anger there. I thought perhaps he was disappointed to have lost the opportunity to bully. But my husband didn’t rise to it, or look away, but instead continued holding the pole as if the train was moving, and everything was ordinary. So because of him I did something I otherwise could never have done, and offered her my hand. The woman took it. Her bones were small and thin, her skin too loose around. But she grasped me tightly and swayed back and forth. 

We sat like that for several minutes. I kept my eyes on the ground, away from the well-dressed man’s horrible stare. The woman rocked in her seat, singing softly under her breath. The boy beside us got up and moved to the far end of the car, but she continued to hold my hand. 

Suddenly the doors at the front of the car opened again. I turned and looked. The couple was sitting, her head on his shoulder, his upon hers, eyes closed, hands clasped. 

Two policemen entered in full outfit. I shriveled into the seat at the sight of the weapons on their belts. I had no experience with guns and was always sure they were about to fire at random. I had no experience with violence; I lived such a lovely life. 

The beautiful man assumed his position of authority. He approached the cops with an outstretched hand, like he knew we were all disappointed to find ourselves here, like bad weather, like a power outage. One cop, a short bald man with russet eyebrows, shook it. The other, who was tall and strapping, ignored him and continued on. I wondered if rank had made this man the leader or if it was merely his better looks. 

He knelt before the woman. 

She flinched away, seeing him, until she met his eyes. 

“Hello there,” he said gently. 

I was generally and specifically anti-cop; for a variety of excellent reasons, I thought this correct. But I saw the gentle look on this man’s face and understood that this individual had dealt with people like this woman before, perhaps even this specific woman, without rancor. 

“I was raped,” she said. She was still holding my hand. 

“I know, dear,” he said. “Let’s get you somewhere safe.” 

I stood and helped her up. The cop offered her his arm, and she, still trembling, transferred her grip to him. 

His partner was speaking with the beautiful man, who gesticulated with rolled-up sleeves. The taller cop frowned at him. 

“That’s enough,” he said. “Leave her alone.” 

At this, he ignited the ire of the car; the woman in the scrubs yelled out again about needing to be home. The woman with her bags moaned about work. The girls had wilted against the far door, no longer interested in the drama. 

“Leave her alone,” the cop said again, with the assertion I’d wanted to have. I wondered now why I hadn’t said it myself. I knew now that nothing would have happened to me, had I spoken up. He’d broken my fear and revealed its silliness. None of these people would have hurt me, not even the beautiful man. I had a lovely life. I was untouchable. I felt ashamed. 

The cop led the woman into the next car, his hand on her elbow like a dutiful grandson. I was not at all sure that her fate was bettered by this; he surely, despite whatever empathy exhibited here, had specific steps he now had to enact, steps of dubious benefit. I wondered where she would sleep and whether it was better than where she’d have slept before she pulled the brake. The partner followed, his gait forceful and fast, as if he had somewhere better to be. 

My husband returned to his seat now and took my hand, the one that had been holding the woman’s. The beautiful man sat down with a heavy sigh opposite us. He saw me looking and raised his eyebrows like we had gone through something together. I stared at him. I could not think what to say. I had only a feeling, pooling on my tongue, of fury. Then he blinked and tilted his head back, like this whole ordeal had made him more tired than he thought fair. 

The train lurched again. A minute later, we had arrived at High Street. 

It was not our stop, but my husband squeezed my knee. “Cab?” 

I nodded. We stood and got off the train. I saw the platform saturated with the feverish clarity of one who’d just been sick. My palm was warm and damp now after so long being touched. I looked up and down the platform for the woman and her escorts, but I couldn’t see them due to the staircases and pillars. 

Slowly, as we ascended to the street, we began to talk about what had happened. As we put it into words, the shock of it fell away until we padded the event in smugness, criticizing the others the same way we gossiped about my boss after a party. In rehashing it, the situation became banal, a crazy thing that had once happened. But when we got home, I kissed him in a way I hadn’t in years, not as foreplay, but as a pleasure in and of itself. 

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Emily Neuberger is the author of the novel A Tender Thing (Putnam, 2020). Her writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sun, The Common, Joyland, the Bennington Review (Pushcart nominee, 2023), Swamp Pink, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College and hosts the reading series Sunday Stories. emilyneuberger.com