Free Subwayland by Randy Kennedy

happened: she discovered that low-priced, cheaply copied, heartfelt short memoirs held together with paper clips actually sell pretty well in the subway.
    In fact, on good days she sells out of them, unloading 20 copies or more of each of her three stories. (One is about the death of her stepmother, with whom she was very close; a second is about online dating and a third is about a whirlwind romance she had with another woman at Columbia. She is at work on a fourth story about another romance.)
    Last Friday afternoon, Ms. Brune was doing a very brisk business in the corridor leading to the Times Square shuttle. As a salesperson, she tends to comport herself with ease, something like a country-store clerk selling overalls to farmers.
    â€œYou like short stories?” she says to the undecided. “Try this one.”
    â€œHey, have a good one now,” she says as they walk away.
    When a man in a baseball cap walked up, she gave him her friendly sales pitch. “You want action or satire?” she asked.
    â€œAction,” he said finally and forked over two bucks for the whirlwind romance. Ms. Brune folded the bills into her pocket. “Guys like the action story,” she said.
    In the space of about two hours, she had sold more than a dozen stories, some to satisfied repeat customers like Orlando Fonseca II, who had also bought the whirlwind romance story and gave it a big thumbs up. “It reminded me of some of the stupid things I did,” he told Ms. Brune, smiling.
    She says that she has never had any customers demand their money back, though one man did return a story, apparently disappointed that she is gay. “I think he was a little sweet on me,” she said.
    Of course, the subway is not always the most genteel sales environment. Once, she spent the whole afternoon with a rambling drunk at her side. The same day, she said, “a slam poet—or whatever he was—came up and slam-poeted me.”
    Some people, most often women in business suits, look at her behind her box, well dressed and well fed, and roll their eyes. But others seem to understand. In fact, one woman recently gave her a $10 bill for a single story.
    â€œO.K., maybe she thought this was about charity,” Ms. Brune said. “Or maybe she just thought I was undervaluing my work.”
    â€”ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 10, 2003
    SUBWAY SCHOOL
    The following are not the kinds of things you typically find at a subway station:
    â€¢ A poster warning that pinkeye might be going around.
    â€¢ A nice woman handing out apple juice.
    â€¢ A group of Brooklynites sitting in a circle, singing, “The more we get together, the happier we will be!”
    â€¢ A group of Brooklynites weeping openly. (O.K., you might actually find this in the subway.)
    But if you go to the Prospect Park station on the Q line in Brooklyn, and choose the wrong door, you may find all of these things just about any weekday morning, along with even more unusual sights.
    For example, if you had been there yesterday morning, you could have watched as a Brooklynite named Colin Hamingson stared thoughtfully out a window at a subway train, and then, in a kind of experimental gesture, licked the window.
    â€œI like the subway,” he announced.
    It is highly unlikely that you will walk through that wrong door at the station. The people behind it have put an electronic lock on it, and a second door behind it with a second lock, because as much as they do not want random people wandering in, they want even less to have anyone inside wandering out and onto the subway.
    That is because many of those inside are just learning how to say “subway.” Some still wear diapers. None of them have MetroCards.
    They are charges of the Maple Street School, a 25-year-old nursery school that moved in September into an old retail space inside the station, making it probably the only subway-station nursery school in the country.
    In the process, the