Excerpt from Dead, a prizewinning  short story by Andrew  J. Skerritt 

The conductor announces each stop. In silence, I scrutinize my fellow passengers aboard the northbound No. Five subway train in Brooklyn heading for Manhattan. I search in vain for a familiar face. I look through a one-way glass. I see them. They cannot see me. I am the dead among the living. Together we ride in quiet isolation. A crowded New York City subway car is the loneliest place on earth.

               I sit in the double seat between the conductor's booth and the rear side door, squeezed between an off-duty transit cop and a Jamaican girl wearing braids. She told me who she was the second she asked the conductor for directions. Seated next to the officer in uniform, I imagine the curved butt of the officer's service revolver digging into my ribs, wrinkling my mauve, double-breasted suit. He kept folding his arms and fingering his piece while looking out of the side of his eyes at half a dozen Puerto Rican-looking youths standing near the door leading to the next compartment. Their boots seem more suited for rocks and boulders than concrete and asphalt. They laugh and jostle each other in a friendly warm up for Times Square. A woman transit cop enters our car and strides down the aisle, eyeing the pocket of Latin energy. The youths fall silent as if on cue.  Within minutes, the train slides further north. Home is lost in the darkness and the cold behind me. I live in a field of strangers. For twenty five years, I lived off Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

 On December fourth, I moved to Evergreen Estates, a ten-acre development resting beneath the sod alongside the Interboro Parkway. My place is twenty feet inside the wrought iron fence.  Low cut grass and freshly turned earth surround me. Patches of beige-brown clay suggest that new neighbors just moved in. Although I'm not used to the damp, frozen earth, this new place has a certain charm. Each dawn I revel in the mist as it drifts over the Chinese section. Huts and gongs stand gaunt. Like Manchurian sentries, they guard their dead in exile. To the left, in the Jewish section, crows play late afternoon games of tag.  Beyond the wrought iron fences and landscaped berm, Parkway traffic crawls east, where Brooklyn peters out and Queens, bushy and pretentious, emerges. To the west and south, yellow cabs honk their horns as they make their mad rush toward Pennsylvania Avenue. They mean no disrespect to us dearly departed residents of Evergreen Estates. A Brooklyn cab driver without a horn is like an undertaker without a hearse.