This short story was an assignment given to my classmates and I. We had to first find a picture from one of Bill Sullivan's Turnstile Photography Project and then we could give that picture a background story. My story is about this man pictured below whom I have named John Newman.

John Newman doesn't know how his day is going to end. He doesn't realize that his life will be taken from him because of the one thing he loves most. John Newman walks through the turnstile that he walks through every morning and thinks nothing of it. He isn't worried about the world around him at this point. His only focus is music as it always is and has been. He walks past the stone pillars that hold up the enormous structure he is now under and it seems to others that he had mistaken the station as some type of concert hall. John doesn't even notice the woman, sitting on the bench to his left, methodically observing each and everything he does. He boards the subway dismissing the fact that someone had dropped their purse directly in front of him, and with a non-cruel intention shoves the woman out of the way. John stands there on his way to work completely oblivious to the world everyone else is accustomed to; that is until he gets to work. At his stop he exits and presses pause on his ipod. It was his favorite song by Papa Roach called "Change or Die". Unfortunately he was now in touch with the world that was not his own. He went through work, like everyone else in his office, and thought nothing of it. 'This day is no different from any other' must have been his thoughts at the time, although he couldn't have been more wrong. Throughout the day it had been raining profusely and yet again he thought nothing of it. The thunder did not seem to distract him as much as the beauty of the lightning. After work he put his tiny headphones into his ears which soon would blare music that would consume him once more as he fell into his own world. He pressed play and watched the lightning as he walked down the street. It seemed to him that the lightning was oddly close but he decided to keep walking. The music seemed to be in sync with the bangs of the thunder. He got to the subway station safely and walks underground to board the train once more. As he is walking towards the tracks people are yelling and screaming to get out of the way. If he would have heard these cries he might have been able to avoid what was running up to him, but he was in his own world now and couldn't have thought anything of it. A man with what looked like a stolen purse was running down the edge of the station directly toward John. Everyone heard the cries of people getting shoved out of the way and the yelps from women saying "STOP THAT MAN!!" but not John. He just stood there worried about nothing. The man with the purse shoved John out of the way down onto the tracks just as the train was coming through the station. John Newman died that day and thought nothing of it.