About five years ago I lived downtown in a major city in the U.S.

I've always been a night person, so I'd often find myself bored after my roommate,

who was decidedly not a night person, went to sleep.

But to pass the time, I used to go for long walks and spend the time thinking. I spent four years like that walking

alone at night and never once had a reason to feel afraid. I always used to joke with my roommate

that even the drug dealers in the city were polite. But all that changed in just a few minutes of one evening.

It was a Wednesday, somewhere between one and two in the morning, and I was walking

near a police-patrolled park quite a ways from my apartment. It was a quiet night, even for a weeknight, with very little traffic and almost no one on foot.

The park, as it was most nights, was completely empty.

I turned down a short side street in order to loop back to my apartment when I first noticed him.

At the far end of the street, on my side, it was the silhouette of a man dancing.

It was a strange dance, similar to a waltz, but he finished each box with an odd forward stride.

I guess you could say he was danced walking, headed straight for me.

Deciding he was probably drunk, I stepped as close as I could to the road to give him the majority of the sidewalk to pass me by.

The closer he got, the more I realized how gracefully he was moving.

He was very tall and lanky and wearing an old suit.

He danced closer still until I could make out his face.

His eyes were open wide and wild. His head tilted back, slightly, looking off at the

sky. His mouth was formed in a painfully wide cartoon of a smile. Between the eyes and the

smile, I decided to cross the street before he danced any closer.

I took my eyes off him to cross the empty street, and as I reached the other side, I glanced back.

And then stopped dead in my tracks.

...