He chose to walk all the way to the next station to avoid the crowd and the noisy traffic. It wasn’t a nice day that Guido was having. He thought so all the while and could bear not the possibility of bumping into someone he knew. An old friend, a nodding acquaintance, the village idiot, or the town drunk; and perhaps be forced to oblige with the niceties of small talk.
No. He walked those heavy steps.
Those gallows-bound heavy steps that made the heels of his ragged old pair of brown workman’s boots echo in the dark chambers that swallowed him up as he plodded on. He could hear the rumblings of the city noise fading behind him as he drew farther and farther away from the urban oblivion.
The better for his ears to muffle without effort the crazy din of metal and rubber and asphalt screeching against each other in the surfaces of his conscious avoidance of drivel and dust. He brought himself even farther away from the dirty navel of the city with every step he took.
He walked with a stoop all the way.
Guido closed his eyes to deepen the darkness even more, as if to challenge himself like a blind man walking alone caneless. He could now hear the train’s groany siren in the distance as he stopped to stand his ground and lift his chin up.
It was time to look up the railway from where he now stood. He lifted his arms and spread it out wide as if to suck in all the foreboding halogen glare that loomed ahead.
His train had come. The light at the end of his tunnel.