Road rash

He did not remember how well he knew the place until his feet adopted a familiar tread, an almost youthful gait that he took a moment to recognise; along this particular stretch of road his feet forgot that they were clad in sturdy business shoes and not the worn, tatty sneakers that had long since disappeared, but which his feet remembered fondly in feel and form and fit. It was that junction again, with its streaking headlights and streaming exhaust hurtling in perpetual counterflow, the growling of intentions poised in cross-purposes across a ten-metre square of intersection that buzzed with tension and expectation. He had long memorised these details, but as the last synapses of recollection congealed in his mind, something else washed up from the cluttered sea of his memory — and what coagulated around these minutiae was not a hollow, echoing continental despair, but merely a terrible and utterly impervious anguish that had hardened and ossified like a scab around a bloody eye. He saw once again what the place had really meant to him, what the rules of the little red man who governed this crossing of paths made possible: it was the pocket of time that the junction created, a bubble of opportunity given an impeccable alias but which never was long enough for him to muster the courage to exploit, not even with a fleeting wave or a tentative greeting, before the green man burst into brilliance to wave time on its way, and the traffic exploded into motion and barrelled past him with the full bellow and bluster and violence of life.