"Moo-oo-oo-oo!"

Officer James Emmet Corcoran spends his mornings and afternoons perched at a busy city intersection, a hard‑edged traffic regulator with a penchant for poetry. Each day he watches a sleek, silk‑clad lady glide by in a glossy roadster, her golden bob and exposed arm turning his routine stop‑and‑go into a private theater of longing. As he directs east‑bound and west‑bound streams of cars, he imagines himself a dancer in the heat waves rising from the asphalt, savoring the brief exchange of smiles and the soft siren that punctuates her passage.

By late afternoon the police officer’s imagination deepens, mixing the clang of horns with a quiet yearning for a world of luxury far beyond his own modest origins. He rehearses a polite greeting he’ll never deliver, while the ebb and flow of traffic becomes a restless backdrop to his reverie. In those fleeting moments between whistles, Corcoran’s day transforms from a monotonous grind into a delicate dance of hope, frustration, and the fleeting grace of a stranger’s fleeting glance.