How the D-Train Saved My Life One Morning       My car had a flat & my heart was still in flutter from the night before. A girl dumped me over lack of shared spaces. Ain't life a bitch. But priorities. I needed to get to work. So I scram to the D-train to make uptown in a flash. Inside, I hold on to metal for dear life and sit down before her. She's old, can pass for someone's disenfranchised grandmother, the flyaway hairs, slop of lipstick, long dress with strings hanging like faded memories, not even Salvation Army potential. A roar of metallic teeth, we buck, the train stops at Alphabet Hell. There's another name for the street, but my memory sometimes derails. So I'm back to the woman. Eyeing her like an old tv show my parents wouldn't let me watch. There's something about her eyes, hazel side of blue, that sparkling quality that speaks bittersweet and what lies for miles in either direction. The train switches. I'm almost in her lap. Something inside me snaps a finger. We're now each other's mirror. ExcusemeIsay, aren't you that actress, Melena Marples? I feel like an impulsive jerk. But Melena was my mother's favorite topic of conversation, her vote for worst actress of 1959, a movie that wouldn't even make a soap opera. Melena, an all-American beauty, played the other girl for a much older businessman who was scarred by Pork Chop Hill. The old woman smiles at me with her eyes. "My name isn't Melena Marples," she says as if reading a nursery rhyme. "Melena Marples died sometime ago." But I know for a fact, as if facts can sometimes be true, that Melena Marples is still alive somewhere in lower Bronx. "May I have Melena's autograph?" I say, my heart a frog and my throat a pond. "My mother loved you in Cecilia's Child." The subway lurches and my wallet falls from my hands. The old siren beats me to it, fumbling to get at it. She hands me the wallet, this look on her face that means kismet or something like. I take out my business card and ask her to sign the back in her Hollywood name. I hand her an engraved pen, which I only carry to impress clients. The train stops at 14th street. We shake hands and she says "It's been a pleasure. I always feel richer whenever I meet someone who remembered me when I wasn't poor. Fame only lasts a moment." She gets off. A slight limp to her gait. I try to track her but she disappears in a crowd of Monday Morning rushers. I willow-wonder: Where is it she has to go? I take the piece of paper, which is now all I have of her and slip it into the wallet. Twenty bucks is missing. I feel so much richer.     - Kyle Hemming