The alley two streets over from the church lot has three lamps in a row and I only ever catch him under the first one, which I've decided isnt nothing, he comes into frame already walking away, always already walking away, coat dark, shoulders a little forward like hes leaning into a wind that wasnt there because I checked, there was no wind logged that night, I checked the airport station after because thats the kind of thing I check now, and the light catches maybe four steps of him before the alley swallows the rest and hes past the second lamp before I even get the phone all the way up, so what I have is legs and a coat and the particular way his left foot turns out a little on the step, thats the tell, thats always the tell, not the face, I never get the face, nobody ever gets the face, that walk though. that walk I would know from the moon. My father used to walk like that after his knee surgery, foot turned out to save the joint, except my father is nine years dead and never set foot anywhere near this state in his life. Anyway.

This isnt the man in tan, I want that on record early because people conflate them and its lazy, the man in tan page is still up if anyone wants to compare gait side by side, tan guy plants his heel first, this one rolls off the toe the whole way through, different men. same handler maybe. I dont know how deep that goes and Im not going to pretend I do tonight. What I do know is neither of them has ever once turned around, not for a car horn, not for a dropped bag two blocks from here that I know for a fact made noise, a normal person turns around for that, they dont, it doesnt.

This is the third time this year Ive picked that same rolling step out of a dark street I wasnt even looking at, third that I caught, could be more, probably is more, you dont clock a pattern until its already a pattern and by then youve missed the first however many for free, the last count I ran on a different man went to seventeen before I stopped writing the word coincidence, so three doesnt scare me yet, three is still early. third one was somewhere sold to me as Sicily and I dont fully trust the caption on that source either at this point, everythings sourced from somewhere and someone, thats a separate list. The stone under those lamps is older than anything the guy walking through it grew up around and I keep coming back to that, an old street doing a new job, wires strung across it that predate whatever this is by a hundred years easy, it doesnt care whose walk it's carry- I dont know why Im making the street sound like it has an opinion, it doesnt, the wires dont either, thats not even the part I meant to write down. sorry for the wall of text, I know how this reads.

UPDATE 9/1:

It happened again and this time I had the phone already up, which probably says something about where my head has been the last few weeks and Im not going to sit here and unpack that for anyone. Wrong street though, not the alley, the alleys been quiet since I started checking it every few days and I am still checking it, this was three blocks north on the strip that runs past the old insaat sign, and I was driving, which is the whole problem with what I got. The light does that thing at speed where it draws itself out into a line, and by the time I had the phone up and pointed the shape was already just a smear off the right shoulder of the road, pale, low against the wall, and Ive circled it on the frame because I dont trust anyone to see it without help, look at where the sidewalk meets the light, thats it, thats the whole photo.

Height is right. The way it doesnt flinch off a set of headlights that close is right, a normal person startles, ducks, throws an arm up, this thing just sits in the blur like the blur is doing the work of standing still for it. Four now if this counts and I think it counts, four, maybe five if the one from back in March counts, except I never wrote the March one down properly so no, Im not putting it on the record, a sighting you didnt log the week it happened isnt a sighting anymore, its a memory, and I dont trust my memory the way I trust a timestamped file.

Seven is still the record and thats not even this guy, thats a different pattern I logged separately and I keep having to say that out loud because people write in asking if theyre the same, theyre not, different gait, different street, different everything except the part where neither one ever turns around, that part is the same on both of them, that part is always the same, that part is the only part I actually trust anymore. The brick under that stretch of sidewalk is the same beige brick as every other stretch on that strip and I went back the next morning in daylight and there was nothing on it. obviously. what did I expect, a footprint, a shoe print, something a normal camera could hold onto. Anyway. still counting.