“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.”
It was dusk, that time of night where the world was just beginning to quiet. Bugs were chirping in the long grasses along the tree lined avenue, birds rustling high in their perches, all settling down for the evening.
The sun was but a whisper on the horizon, a pale pink glow illuminating the townspeople’s way to their beds.
James Bond could feel the leaves crunching under his feet, having just fallen just a few nights before in an unseasonably cold day for early September. The trees were barely hanging on to the green of summer- leaves drooped, fading and hardening with every passing moment.
His footsteps seemed to grow louder the longer he walked, night closing in quickly, creeping up on earth as it is wont to do.
Bond knew intimately that silence was never an accurate indication of being alone, he often classified situations as more dangerous the quieter they were. The lightest footsteps, in his opinion, belonged to two creatures: cats and assassins (though sometimes it is impossible to differentiate between the two).
On this early fall night, Bond could feel something stirring. It wasn’t his finely honed sixth sense of being watched that alerted him, but the feeling of an unknown power about to be unleashed: the calm before a lightning storm, the breath before a whispered secret, the rush before the fall.
Bond cast his eyes in all directions as he continued to walk. This feeling unnerved him.
He spotted a figure up ahead, near the gate that separated this path in the park from the rest of the small town. A man was sitting on a park bench, reading by the light of a lamp post.
The man looked innocuous enough, dark trousers, tan jacket, shoes that were not conducive to running or walking silently. He seemed quite enraptured in his book, and as Bond watched, the man shifted sideways, shining more light onto the page-
He didn’t think he was that tired. His eyes very rarely pulled tricks on him.
He shut his eyes firmly, shook his head, and reopened them- a move he hadn’t done since childhood. He barely resisted the urge to rub his eyes in a cartoon-ish manner.
The man was reading his book by the light of the lamp post, yes, but the lamp post was bent into a strange shape. It curved down, shining directly on the man and his book. All the other lights along the path stood straight and tall, black metal reaching toward the sky, yellow puddles of light illuminating the surrounding area.
Bond had seen many peculiar things in his life, people and places and deeds that would disturb most of the general population. He had never been rattled by something this simple before.
In a small corner of his mind, he wondered why he wasn’t brushing this…phenomenon… off as a joke- a lamp post created to induce double-takes, something made for the town to smile over.
It would be easy to imagine the townspeople buying this trick lamp post, excited to surprise the few visitors that wandered through the village. Maybe it was a tourist stunt- Come Read By Our Gravity-Defying Lamp Post!- but that thought was a stretch.
Unsure on why he was spending so much time and energy on this strange object, Bond kept walking. If the matter still bothered him in the morning, he would come back and examine it, preferably before the rest of the town woke up and laughed at him falling for their joke.
As Bond walked past the man reading by the impossible lamp post, he focused only on his breathing, the cool air, and the thought of the quilt-covered bed in the small room awaiting him at the hotel. It had been a long day, and he obviously needed sleep.
He cast the lamp post and the man from his thoughts, unaware that the young man on the bench read on, and as he flipped his page, and night continued to fall, the lamp post shuffled a little closer, light shining directly on the open book below.
