A Man Stood on the Corner of York and Thile

Quick note: This is a horror short

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A man stood on the corner of York and Thile.
Backstreets, dappled by stillness on these quiet nights, are not often are filled with the shapes of strangers. Shapes brought to prominence by the hospital white saturation of a solitary street light.
The shadow, a man, cut with streaks of darkness, looks downward: staring into some unknowable pool of thought below. He does not stir as a car ambles past, he remains impassive, he remains a stranger, quietly standing within the singular vacuum of himself, alone at this late hour.
Closing his eyes against the departing headlight’s glare, the man exhales and draws a cigarette to his mouth. A single light, one tiny firefly, whisps into existence centimeters from his nose. Small and dull the firefly radiates into brilliant orange, a star raging against the void around it. This light fades, quelled by the wind, the firefly is dimmed too.

The man exhales.

Why does he stand on the corner so late at night, why is his impassive figure so menacing? A sleepless man? Just looking for a moment to clear his head in the fresh air.
Thumbing a copper lighter he draws the cigarette to his mouth again and takes a slow breath.

From the hunch of the stranger’s shoulders he seems now to belost in thinking–or helplessly waiting?–this man of hidden features stands alone, soundlessly shuffling without purpose or obvious reason.
A family somewhere? The deep shame he feels picking up his cigarettes and looking to the face of his young son. He goes out to the street, 2am, the man wanders out and smokes, not realising that he’s already lit a second.

Or does he wait with malice?

Paticently, he bides his time for the house across the road to turn off their lights, let darkness–his ally– cover actions still being considered. The glint of a knife caught so softly in the dark? Or just a watch being checked as he loses his nerve.
The man stands still, stooped with bent shoulders as if to almost wither underneath the light that bathes over him. Would it not make more sense to stand in the shadows? Be the watcher and not the watched.
Maybe he wishes to make himself known then, to brazenly stand in plain sight, proud that he is seen.

He looks upward, small beats of rain now patter down cooling the sunbaked bitchumen of the backstreet. He stares to the light, seemingly lost in its electric radiance. It flickers, the mercury vapor globe dimming in its glow, the glass weak from overuse, reaching the end of its life.
Did he do that?
Wind appears, rustling the leaves and shaking droplets in naturalistic crescendo, the spitting rain continues to drum down as a soft underline to this otherwise silent moment.

He exhales again and smoke licks into the abstract.

Placing the cigarette onto the ground, he twists the butt roughly and grounds the firefly out of existence. He did not throw his wasted cigarette, or simply drop to the road below. He stooped and with purpose placed the butt onto the ground, grinding and crushing all life from it then leaving it abandoned upon the road.
His hands, now shoved firmly into coat pockets, were left idle as the patient activity of smoking had ceased and his reason for standing in the street lost.
Looking upward the faint moon’s glow through clouds brooding and grey illumintes that man in bolder lines that the streetlight before. Growing wrinkled with a smile, the man sighs and for the first time I see how old he truly is, the lines of memory streaked across his brow.

He left in direction struck meaningless, and departed the halo of light upon the corner of York and Thile, ending his own mystery.
As night consumes day, small moments can grow in meaning, imagination tricks the weary mind and I grow to wonder if I ever did see that man, that apparition of weary imagination, haunting a troubled mind so late into the dark…

And yet, a discarded cigarette lies in the gutter of York and Thile.

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J.McCray
2020