I was making the arduous journey to the quaint enclave known as Franklin Park to visit a dear friend of mine when I brought my car to a halt at a red light at the Westmoreland-Kirby intersection. I had been coming from the direction of Longfellow, and was preparing to make a right turn when a curious growth on the side of the electric pole on the opposing sidewalk caught my eye.
It turned out to be a traffic light.
I stared at it, disbelieving and sickened. Was it a trick of the light? Had it been here the whole time? Since when? Where the heck did it come from? What genius decided to stick it on an electric pole on the OPPOSITE side of the road??
Alarmed, I turned to my brother in the passengers seat.
“…Has that light always been there?” I tentatively queried.
“I dunno,” he responded, sparing only a moment to look up from his iTouch and glance at the indicated traffic light.
My suspicions had been confirmed. This was a ghost light, a lie, a fraud, a sham; a despicable scheme to harm the kindly citizens of McLean… or perhaps I had just missed the light before.It was fully functional, but it was a good twenty or so feet from the neighboring traffic lights for the other two lanes of the road which hung clearly on the wire directly in the line of sight of the drivers. I had driven this road hundreds, nay, thousands of times, yet I had never seen this light before. Its appearance was as shocking as that of a ghost or some like ethereal creature, and had the nature of an optical illusion- there one moment, gone the next, as if it had never existed in the first place.
As I sat at the red light, contemplating my existence, I came to a startling realization. This light- this curious, odd, little traffic light- was meant to direct travellers in the far right lane. But how had I never noticed it before?
The answer lay it its placement. Whatever fool had designed the placement of the traffic lights at the intersection had clearly had a moment of exceptional idiocy when it came to this light’s placement. What if someone missed the light? There could be a devastating collision, or the world could implode, who knew? As I observed the lights patterns, however, I deduced that the light essentially followed the same patterns as its neighboring brethren, giving the same signals at the same time. It was clear, then, that it was not only the light’s placement that was improper. Its very existence was an abomination, unnecesssary and unwanted; yet it had slipped through the cracks of the system like some sort of bastard child.
All the lights turned green, and I left the intersection for the moment, continuing onward on my journey. Though my eyes turned back to the road, my mind remained back at the intersection, forever haunted by the things it had seen, faith in humanity lost forever.
