Sisyphus

He was in the middle of an inquest when he got hit by a stone. He turned his face to see who it was but saw no one. He stood up and walked towards the alley. He then took out a cigarette from his coat and lit it.

After blowing out some smoke, he threw the burning cigarette away without putting it out, and leisurely walked towards the alley. 

Suddenly he noticed a shadow running away from him. He started running after the shadow. His eyes unable to locate the person who threw the stone at him, all he could hear was the rustling of dry leaves, creating a lot of chaos in the silent night.

 And the shadow.

He followed the shadow. A left turn. And again. And again. By now, he was out of breath and had to stop. He was sweating profusely even in the cold of the night. 

He had missed the shadow. He kicked a small rock out of frustration.

“What a fast bastard!”, he thought.

He looked around, he had come back to where he had started, the place of investigation, but everything looked different now, there wasn’t a single spot of blood, no corpse, nothing. There were no traces that could indicate that a man had been murdered at that site. The path looked clear as though no crime had taken place there.

He stood there, wondering what had just happened. He heard a man walking, his footsteps coming closer with each step. He hid behind the wooden bench, cautiously, trying to see the man.

He knew him, it was the same man whose body he had been investigating some minutes ago. He felt confused and nauseous, no answer to the situation came to his mind. He once again heard the rustling of leaves and saw a shadow in the bushes nearby. Within a second’s reflex, a bullet was fired from there and the man standing in front of him dropped dead. He lay still, in a pool of blood. The detective cursed himself, he could have saved the man, but he had abetted the killer in this murder.

 He ran towards the bush, in search of the murderer, but found nothing. 

He came back to investigate the body, he saw some pieces of paper clenched in the man’s hand, he opened the fist, tried to reconcile the pieces and after some time, he realized what was written. 

"Sisyphus",

 He knew who Sisyphus was. The king of Ephyra, from Greek mythology. He was punished for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness, cheating death was or never, shall be any man’s power. He was forced by Zeus to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity. From that time Sisyphus has been rolling the stone to the cliff over and over again but never being able to reach the edge of the cliff.

As he stood thinking about it and trying to form the connection between the word and the murder, he got hit by a stone on his head, and he ran to find out who it was.