There was a fire in the clock tower, it was a certainty. Not just any certainty either, he knew with all his intestinal fortitude that he needed to react, and react fast. He looked around at the people strolling about the base of the clock on this mild spring Saturday afternoon and the thought came to him that none of them could ever share this terror, not now, not terrors past. He alone carried the weight of changing these miscellaneous people’s lives forever by what he was to take action by doing.
There was a small woman with a child licking a rainbow flavored ice-cream cone to his left. The ice-cream would fall, he could see it happening before they finished walking this block. The child would cry and his mother would try to hush him by threatening to pinch his upper arms. He would be reduced to sniveling. In later years, he would pinch his thighs when he was agitated. He would do this subconsciously.
There was a man holding hands with a curly blond-headed woman behind him. The woman wasn’t the man’s wife but an excuse born out of the mistreatment the man thought his wife was doling out. He wanted to watch his wife with another man. What he didn’t know was that he was more interested in watching himself have sex with another man. The blond-headed women thought nothing. Once in awhile, she thought there might be some money in dating men for a living. In later years, she would be hooked on heroin and receive the AIDS virus the first time she turned a trick to get it. At the moment though, she was beautiful and knew it.
The man watching the fire couldn’t hold all these thoughts in his head anymore. The past, the present, the future all came rushing at him with an impact of a semi-truck on steroids. The fire may have already happened, the fire may be happening now, the fire may yet to happen.
The man put his hands over his ears as if to block out the sounds of the mute word pictures of the people on the street, turned and ran.
He was killed by a speeding fire truck two blocks away.
