LAMIAE

CHAPTER TWO: TRAIN JOURNEY

The girl named Dagmara looked at the people with whom she shared the carriage, looking for an appropriate adjective to describe them.

Eccentric, she thought, but then a better thought occurred to her. Weird...

Opposite her sat a mother with a child. The woman wasn't interested in anything else but solving sudoku puzzles, biting the pencil between her teeth every now and then. Her child, on the other hand, sat on the train with a hood over his head for a two and a half hours... Not to mention the fact that it was difficult to determine his or her sex, this young child didn't behave like a five-six-year-old. The way of expressing opinion or answering mother's insignificant questions resembled that of an adult, which made Dagmara wonder who in the family sitting across from her was the parent and who the child.

Next to the mother there were sitting a young couple, tickling each other, apparently trying to deal with the boredom. The girl, combed in a loose ponytail, from time to time slapped the boy's face, and then he smiled, showing everyone present his four front golden teeth. They were so loud that Dagmara had a hard time stopping herself from smirking, and although the two boys sitting next to her had no hesitation in giggling at the couple, she tried to restrain her emotions. The boys sitting next to her laughed, joking too ostentatiously among themselves that the boy had lost every tooth to his girlfriend's blows. Dagmara sensed with disgust that the unpleasant smell of alcohol was spreading from the ginger-hair boy sitting directly next to her. And the second of them must have been under the influence of something stronger, because a banana smile never left his lips.

The last person who, like her, seemed disgusted with the teenagers' behavior was an older woman. And however normal she might seem at first glance, as soon as she took off her sweater Dagmara changed her mind. There were some symbols on the woman's hand, something in the shape of tattoos, as if she belonged to some sect. Unfortunately, the girl was too far from the woman to have a chance to look at the tattoos up close. The signs themselves were nothing strange nowadays, but the murderous look of the woman when Dagmara noticed them, yes.

The boys next to her once again laughed at the pair who made efforts to get out of the carriage. They made efforts; not that they did it right away. The girl squealed happily as her partner grabbed her belly. Saving herself from his hands, she sat back in her seat, then screamed wildly and rushed towards the escape.

The train began to slow down gradually, giving loud signs of it. It howled, clattering and rubbing his wheels on the rails, then finally froze. Dagmara glued herself to the window as much as possible so that she could see the name of the station. When she turned her head, there was no sign of the couple, so she concluded that they must have got off here. With their departure, the carriage immediately became silent, almost deaf.

However, she couldn't enjoy a dreamed-of peace for a long time, because some familiar song melody reached her ears and after a while she realized that one of the passengers, a boy who was sitting next to a woman with a tattoo, had received a phone call.

"What's up?" a sonorous, young, male voice echoed through the carriage.

Dagmara leaned against the cold glass. Even though it was the end of the holidays, it was still very warm and the open window in the carriage didn't help much.

"No, not yet. About an hour more," the boy replied to the question, which must have been about where they were. Dagmara was also due to get off in less than an hour, so probably the boys were going, like her, to Kielce, the small town where she was supposed to live from know on.

"Of course."

The carriage shuddered slightly, she could feel it. She didn't like traveling by train, although, paradoxically, she loved trams and the subway. She took a deep breath, sadly realizing that where she was going, the only public transportation would be yellowish-red buses.