wide minutes

The detective stopped walking to read the marquee. The main feature: Two Known Bones, an action film he’d never heard of. Two other movies played on smaller screens: Wide Minutes and Until Death Do Dawn. He continued walking south down the boulevard with his feet aching and the sunlight waning. A loner, moving or not, eating or performing any mundane task in his week, month, year. Alone even when not. Some mornings he sits at the sunlit window reading and sometimes writing in his pocket notebook, either working through a case or working through himself. Last night he dreamed of a brown bear following him through the city, trying to hide from him. His question wasn’t: Why is a brown bear in the city? but: What does this bear want from me? He strode south and west and asked himself various questions pertaining to truth and how we can know what truth is. One response arrived as a breeze on his sweaty forehead: Walk through your aches. Walk through your pain. Walk to gain clarity, focus, understanding. 

The detective moved on. Who is he? Who he is matters less than what he does, what he thinks, how he moves. A timeless hero in any language, any culture. The city marked by tapestries of sound and light, heat and rancid alleyways. The city bewilders and disappoints. But it breathes life into you. He walks at night, a shadow on the cement and pavement, faded and elongated, then more defined as he moves beneath and past the streetlamp. Then he’s gone. The next object moves in, casts its shadow.