The phrase “Castor’s Walk” long predates the story as well as the collection it shares a title with. It rattled around in my head for years demanding materialization, and I can source it back to two things. One half of it came from the 2009 fantasy film Ink directed by Jamin Winans, a piece of music called John’s Walk. The other half came from the title of Minneapolis-born artist Dessa’s second studio album; Castor, the Twin.
The story Castor’s Walk possessed me and wrote itself during slow shifts at work and in the middle of the night. It’s a story of futile struggle narrated by someone who can only watch, the mythological half-brothers Castor and Pollux separated by physical space and varying states of mortality in a city not unlike the Tokyo depicted in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (回路) (“Something is filling the concrete with ghosts”—Kurosawa’s influence here is astronomical) where the only comfort is a sad reminder of what’s been lost.
- WL