The Crossing Guard of Holt Avenue
2 min read · Original fiction — a story, not a true account
Every parent on Holt Avenue tells their children the same thing on the first day of school: wait for Mr. Byrne at the corner, hold up your hand, and he'll walk you across.
None of them mention, because it has simply become an unremarkable fact of living on Holt Avenue, that Mr. Byrne retired from the crossing guard job in 1991 and passed away the following January, and that the man in the orange vest and the old-fashioned cap who still meets the children at the corner every school-day morning has never once been photographed clearly, spoken above a murmur, or been seen walking away in any direction once the children are safely across.
New families find out gradually. A neighbor mentions it over a fence in passing tone, the way you'd mention a odd but harmless neighborhood habit, and the new parents laugh it off until their own child comes home describing the crossing guard's kind, tired face in more detail than any living stranger should offer a six-year-old on a first meeting.
The town tried, once, in 2003, to install an automated crossing signal to replace what everyone politely called 'the volunteer position.' The signal was installed on a Friday. By Monday it had failed in a way the electrician could not explain, and Mr. Byrne was back at his corner, cap tipped, hand raised, patient as ever.
Nobody has tried to replace him since. The town simply budgets, every year, for a crossing guard position that has technically been vacant for three decades, and pays the modest stipend into a fund that maintains the small bench at the corner where, some say, if you look quickly enough in the very early morning before the children arrive, you can see him sitting, waiting for his shift to start.
A few of the older residents remember him from before, when he was warm and living and known for keeping butterscotch candies in his coat pocket for the children who crossed shy. They say he took the job seriously in life because his own son had been struck by a car on that same corner in 1968, before there was any guard there at all.
Whatever kept Mr. Byrne at his post after death, nobody on Holt Avenue has ever felt the need to disturb it. Every child who has ever waited at that corner has crossed safely, every single time, for over sixty years running, and around here, that is simply considered a very good arrangement to leave alone.
"He had one job, and dying had not, in his own opinion, changed the terms of his employment."
