Tick followed tock

He waited impatiently at the pedestrian crossing that treated everybody on foot like a second class citizen. After twenty seconds stood still waiting for the lights to change from green to amber then finally to red to halt the seemingly never ending procession of cars he glanced down to check he'd pressed the button, which he had. He knew already that he'd done so but wasn't adverse to checking that he hadn't gone mad and was also accounting for the possibility that it was broken. It felt to him like the second coming of Christ was more likely to occur than being able to cross the road before he became of a pensionable age but finally the lights relented and the prisoner stepped forward as the gates swung open. The beeps sounded hurried and maniacal like they were reminding him how unimportant he was in comparison to the traffic and then they stopped their incessant repetition before he'd even gotten across the gap of both lanes, as if a forewarning to him that if he got runover now it was his own stupid fault for not moving fast enough. You'd have had to have had a start like Usain Bolt to have made it fully across before they stopped. Why do they bother to encourage you to walk to save the planet and yet hold you in a stasis of time? Maybe it was just a curt reminder that they were still in charge, or that their message was merely words for show and that really they didn't care at all for the same lights would doubtlessly have quick marched, double stepping in time if there was no traffic approaching from either direction and turned to red instantly when there was no need for them at all and you could have gone across and back twenty times before you saw a vehicle. 

Now safely across, walking in front of him was a schoolgirl who'd come from the right. Her tiny feet made her legs look fat which in fairness to the poor girl they weren't at all, it's just that her school shoes didn't marry up to the rest of her like it was the one part of her that had forgotten to grow with all that stood above them. Instantly feeling guilty just for having the sort of thoughts that would have thrown a schoolgirl into turmoil for the rest of her days if she'd been party to them, he crossed another road which miraculously was free of traffic, waited for one car to pass on an island and crossed again as if by some minor miracle he'd been offered a path to absolution. 

Five minutes later he found himself walking past a car lot where an older woman was busy thanking a young man who looked like one of his parents had mated with a giraffe and a young woman in her very early 20s with long straight blonde hair who looked like she was playing at being a grown up in a long black jumper, sleeves pulled down to cover her hands in the cold air, her legs in thick black tights. It felt like it could have once been her school uniform but that now the jumper had been changed. The way she said ‘ohhh you’re welcome’ sounded wet and he wondered if he might not have needed some water on his road to hell, having lost the road to salvation already. You're a bad man he thought to himself and allowed a wry smile to creep across his face. He surmised he'd be alright for a while longer though if the local highways agency was in charge of the pedestrian crossing if he needed to wait to enter the depths of hell. Or maybe this was purgatory and no bastard had bothered to ever point it out to him? Still there's a reason all birds migrate south for the winter and at least where he's heading he'll be warmer and amongst his own kind.