The Block Don’t Blink: The Walk

Twenty minutes. Taevo is twenty-two, overdressed for the heat and moving fast toward the only job interview that has ever mattered. Then an old man goes down on his bike in the middle of the street. Cars go around him. People step over him. Phones come out. Taevo stops. It costs him thirty seconds. It keeps happening. A woman crying on the train while the whole car looks away. A robbery in daylight with a crowd filming it. A kid cornered while grown men scroll past. Every time, the city gives him the same lesson: keep walking. The closer he gets, the stranger the crowds look. Nobody is reacting anymore. Nobody is even blinking. In a packed intersection, surrounded by hundreds of lit screens and open eyes, Taevo stops walking and looks back at all of them.