Goes Walking
Closing the door on rank yellow light from his warm & slipperfooted house, I step out into the night, wet as the mouth of a large black dog. I choose a street with the hope that it leads to this beast's black heart, whose black drums mount the back of my throat. At the top of a hill with the city glistening below, there's an alley into which I turn. The concrete walls on either side are tall and so long they appear to converge. Ahead, another woman has entered, her footfall made deafening by the slim corridor. I follow the spiked shadow of her frail body, backlit by a swath orange vapor, the city's breath, that lies far off, past the end of the alley. I let my heavy footsteps fall in behind her. She hurries her pace, never turning around I walk faster, closing the space between us. How easy it would be now, to run and knock her down! I work hard to keep from playing games with my feet rapping out a fast staccato rhythm, slapping the pace of an erratic jog. The woman shifts nervously from wall to wall I let my right leg drag behind me, the left stepping hard, sounding the irregular hiss and tock of a limping madman. I tuck my hair in my hood, cover my chest with my muffler. When she turns I keep my head low, watching through the ragged wool of my bangs until I see it, yes, her fearful white eyeshade--- like that of a deer caught in headlights of an onrushing car. Her hair falls away from her throat as she turns forward again.
A powerful thing to say, Linda
Cruel, yes—and that is its force. The night here is not sanctuary but stage, every step a deliberate act of power. What unsettles most is not the pursuit itself, but the way fear is played like an instrument—each drag of a shoe, each false limp, a performance meant to tighten the air.
It reminds me how fragile safety is, how the same gestures that might once signal intimacy can, in another context, become threat. Proximity alone decides nothing; it is who commands the distance that determines the truth.
In my own writing, I circle this edge often—where intimacy and violence share a language, where devotion is born from the same silence as fear. The difference lies in what follows: whether cruelty closes the scene, or whether it becomes the beginning of a bond.
—Louis