The traffic light went from green to red without a sound.

Amazing that it was still working. Here, nestled in the very center of this empty town. At the intersection of two minor roads. The color oozed through the viscous darkness. Small buildings loomed their cold faces above the roads. There were no lights in the windows. Neither were there cars here, to obey the floating red eyes that hovered above on twigs of iron. There was only one person. He walked up to the thick white line just before the intersection. He stopped. There would be no cars coming across. There would be no cars coming from behind or in front of him. He knew this. But he stopped anyway. Maybe out of pity. This light hadn’t had anyone to halt or usher forward for a very long time. He knew this too. So he waited patiently, like he would have done a long time ago, behind the wheel of a hungry beast purring for its meal of asphalt. His hands were in their pockets, imagining the grip of flesh to vulcanized rubber, round and smooth. How strange, how the memories could come flooding back, so easily, with such fervor. Memories of anything and everything.

But there was no car, there was no wheel, there was no anxious toe on the gas pedal, no expectant hand on the gear shift. There were only boots, worn to pieces with love, clasped against calloused feet with cold sweat, laces tied four times over scraping along the ground.

The traffic light went from red to green.

He stepped forward. The sound of his boot on the road echoed against the buildings that lined the intersection. It was a dull thud, but it was spread flat on the brick walls again and again until it was like a thin smoke in the air, a taut vibration, and then it was diluted and destroyed somewhere in the atmosphere above the painted roofs.

He listened to it as it died away. The first step. The first step in what? Would it prove important? Or was it another waste of his body’s ability to transport itself? It didn’t matter though. These thoughts never did. They were only a burden, necessary though they were to travel. They were meals for the ghosts that laid their invisible picnics by the sides of the roads. Someone had to feed them, or else they would keep coming to the same place with empty wicker baskets forever.

A second step. Just as important as the first, but without all the disgusting metaphorical implications. It was easier to take the second step. And the third – yes, the third – merely a matter of momentum. Soft and yielding, was that third step, always and everywhere.

He walked on, across the blank square of dark that was the intersection. He looked both ways as he crossed, some dying piece of his mind expecting to see headlights. There were none. His hands firmly in his pockets, he arrived at the other side. He stopped, and took a deep breath, as if he had made it a hundred miles rather than a few yards. He let the air out of his decaying lungs, and let his neck falter and his head swing down to face the road between his feet. He examined the cracks in the asphalt in between the tiny pieces of gravel, trapped in some wet blackness that would not let go, held under in the green gloom that shone down like alien flame from the towering lights above. As he watched, the road reflected green, then yellow, then red once again. He tore his head away from the microcosm. It was beautiful, but he had his own to live.

He moved forward. The light from the intersection receded behind him, and night crept into him from behind his ears, curling around his back with undulating tentacles. He had the urge to turn around, but he knew that he had to keep moving.

A spec in the static, white one moment and black the next, but the glow was constant, and the noise was pure, and it moved. It moved. It was not still.

He passed by houses in the gathering dark. There were no lights in them. The only light was that of sickly moon, finding its way through tattered clouds. The stars were mostly obscured, but in places they shone through one at a time, tired and lonely. There seemed to be no wind. Nothing to cycle the air. Each breath seemed to pull in the same bundle of molecules, and spit them out again. The only things with motion were the boots on the pavement, and the eyes that darted in and out of the scenery, braiding themselves into its frightening majesty.

The houses were behind him, and now the road was narrow and curving under a canopy of trees. From all sides and all angles flashed the courageous yellow lamp-lights of fireflies. Some hovered over the road on brittle wings, some swam in the thick darkness of the grass, some dwelled in the cool of the bushes, some hid in the branches of the trees. But some bravely plastered their tiny brightness against the dark of the sky for a brief second before being swallowed.

They were everywhere, flashing again and again, from all around, above and behind, beneath and before. They spread themselves out and kept their distance, and took their daring photographs of the bleak world around them. The earth’s paparazzi. Suddenly all aimed at him.

He threw his hands up over his eyes, for the lights were blinding him, dazzling him. Evolution had laid him a trap, here on this black stretch of endless road. Each picture from each perspective, compiled evidence, all being stacked and filed away somewhere in a world between worlds, being counted and organized by angle and by time. They could see him now from every direction, from every place, during every moment. So long as their angles were from the outside. A photo from the inside: only he could provide that. He had been providing them all his life, and he could stand it no longer. The polaroids were shaken and developed in his dense brain, the walls nearly bursting from the internal pressure, hung in the damp red light on razor wire above a leaking bathtub, clipped up and then taken off to lay in pools of seeping liquid as the colors took shape and the shapes took color and reason began to mold itself to match the little square memories laid in rows and stacked on tables all filling up a place already so small.

Enough. Enough. No more film. No more pictures. Disperse.

He watched the insects all lift off in gentle streams from the grasses and the leaves. They flew upward through the moonbeams, their cameras and guiding lights still flaring up and down like cigarettes, switching on and off like traffic lights eternally stuck on the phase in between motion and stillness. His hands left his pockets, reaching upward, trying to feel the breeze from the thousands of lacework wings beating at the air with a force unnamable. But his tender fingers could feel nothing. Only the thin air of the night slipping between them like fish or feathers or something alive and sweet, and they fold into twitching fists and recede into his pockets as he resumes his steady pace down the black carpet.