Claire Diamant

terminus

Originally conceived as a series of loosely connected short stories, terminus is a novella centred around a group of people who get stuck in a subway train that keeps moving—speeding past each designated stop. The bulk of terminus’s subject matter was inspired by my frequent trips on the TTC and the strange serenity that settles over the trains in the early afternoon before the schools let out.

“There is a stretch of stops on Line One which feel like a sort of in-between. You are not in the city, but you aren’t out of the looming shadow of Toronto, either. These are my favourite stops—without fail, no matter how crowded the subway starts, when it gets to the end, it is always nearly empty. If you’re there in the middle of the day, as I tend to be, it feels like an alternate reality, a dystopia where people have disappeared but the trains still run.”