Four Seconds of Stopped Strangers

There is a paved square between my tram stop and my office, big enough that at 8:50 on a weekday maybe two hundred people are crossing it in every direction. I have crossed it two thousand times. I know its choreography.

One morning in June the choreography stopped. Between one of my steps and the next, everybody halted. Not slowed — halted, mid-motion, like a video paused on an unflattering frame. A man ahead of me stood with one foot fully off the ground and never wavered, never tipped. A woman's coffee hung tilted past the angle where pouring becomes spilling, and did not spill. Two pigeons hung above the fountain, wings at ugly half-beat angles, stuck to the air like ornaments.

I kept walking. That is the detail people question most and I understand why, but I did: three, maybe four steps through a stopped world, my footsteps suddenly very loud, my breath the only weather. I passed close enough to the coffee woman to see steam standing still above her cup like cotton wool, close enough to see her eyelashes arrested halfway through a blink.