Updated Mar 24, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 1: The wrong street
INES
She’d taken this shortcut a hundred times.
Frenchmen Street to her apartment in the Tremé was a fifteen-minute walk that she’d done after every late set for three years — down the main strip past the bars and the other clubs, left on Kerlerec, through the residential blocks where the music faded to the usual city sounds. She knew every step of it. She knew which streetlight flickered and which sidewalk square was raised enough to catch a heel and which house had the dog that barked at midnight and then settled. She knew this walk the way she knew the fingering for a difficult passage: not by thinking about it.
Tonight she turned left on Kerlerec at twelve-forty and walked the first block without seeing anything, her saxophone case over her shoulder and her mind still half in the set. She’d gone long on the third number — the Coltrane arrangement she’d been working on for six weeks, the bridge section that kept resisting her — and it had finally opened up in the last eight bars, the resolution she’d been reaching for, and she was still in it. Walking and not quite back yet.
She was thirty feet from the alley entrance on the second block when she saw the man.
He was in the alley, which was lit by a single security light at the far end. He was facing away from her, standing with the specific stillness of someone who has heard something and is determining what it was. She registered him and processed him as environmental information the way you processed things at twelve-forty on a city street — noted, categorised, non-threatening, continue.
Then he shifted.
Ten seconds. That was all it took. She didn’t have a coherent way to describe it afterward — not because it was unclear but because the clarity of it was the problem, the specific lucid precision of what she’d seen, which her mind kept trying to refuse without succeeding. The man was a man and then the man was something else. A shape that was enormous and low and entirely black, the specific black that had no light in it, a large cat — the largest cat she’d ever seen outside of a nature documentary, larger than anything that belonged on a New Orleans backstreet, with the quality of something that had been here much longer than the street around it. And then the shape was a man again. And then, without looking back, without any indication that he knew she was there, he walked north along the alley and was gone.
She stood on the sidewalk.
She stood there for a full minute, which she counted — she was a musician, she had a functional internal metronome, she counted sixty beats at a walking tempo and did not move.
Then she walked home.
She did not run. She was aware of the option to run and she set it aside, because the figure had not looked at her and had not moved toward her and was gone, and running was for threats and she had not been threatened. She walked home with her saxophone case over her shoulder and her mind doing a rapid and unhelpful inventory of every possible explanation.
The inventory was short.
She did not sleep.
She lay in her apartment on the second floor of the Tremé building and looked at the ceiling and thought about what she’d seen with the specific precision she applied to music that wasn’t working. The way you took a passage apart when it was wrong: note by note, beat by beat, not allowing yourself the comfort of vagueness. What had she actually seen.
She’d seen a man in an alley.
She’d seen the man change shape.
She’d seen a large black cat where the man had been.
She’d seen the man where the cat had been.
She had not been drinking. She’d had two glasses of water and a coffee at the club, which was her standard set-night intake because dehydration affected the embouchure. She was not on anything. She had corrected for lighting — the security light at the far end had been consistent, no flicker, no unusual shadows. She had corrected for distance — thirty feet, which was not a distance at which she’d misread details in her three years of walking this route.
She lay on her back and went through it again. Man. Change. Cat. Change. Man. Gone.
And then she thought about the quality of the stillness before the change. The specific quality. The way a person who is very alert and very controlled holds themselves — not the stillness of surprise or fear but the stillness of someone who is entirely present and has already processed the situation and is deciding what to do about it.
She was a musician. She read people for a living, in the sense that a musician on a stage reads a room and adjusts. She knew what attention looked like.
Whoever that had been, standing in the alley at twelve-forty on Kerlerec Street — they had known she was there.
She sat up.
She sat on the edge of her bed and thought: they knew I was there. They heard me thirty feet away and they shifted before they looked at me and they walked away north and they never turned around.
She thought: they chose to let me see it.
She didn’t know why that was the thought that arrived, or whether it was accurate, or what it meant if it was.
She lay back down and looked at the ceiling until the light changed and the city started up its morning and she was still not asleep.
She got up and made coffee and sat at her window with her notebook — not sheet music, the other notebook, the one she wrote things down in when she couldn’t make sense of them any other way — and wrote what she’d seen. All of it, in the specific order, without elision.
She looked at what she’d written.
Then she turned to a new page and wrote: *What do I do with this.*
She sat with the blank page for a long time.
She made a second coffee.
She had a show the next night and she needed to sleep, and she wasn’t going to sleep, and what she’d seen was either something that had no explanation she had access to or it was something that had an explanation she hadn’t found yet.
She was going to find it.
She was a musician. She’d been making impossible passages work since she was seventeen. You didn’t run from the thing that wasn’t yielding. You sat with it and came at it from a different angle until it gave you what it was.
Whatever she’d seen on Kerlerec Street was going to give her what it was.
She looked at the window, at the morning light on the Tremé rooftops, and thought: I am not going to pretend I didn’t see it.
That was the decision. That was where she landed, at four in the morning with bad coffee and no sleep.
She wasn’t going to pretend.
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