Today:
I walk through a park that I call “lunchpark” in my head but only “the park” if anyone asks. I skim stones on a small lake with a central island. I sling a shale piece and it beams by the island’s north bank. After I throw it, or perhaps during or before, a black swan emerges from the rushes, silently aglide. I watch as the swan sustains the stone’s pelt below its right eye, perfect and rough. I study the continuing stillness of the water, as the swan’s ornate frame inverts. It extends a single black wing skyward in an ugly keeling ballet and when its red webbed-feet appear only one of them kicks as its body sinks to a shallow and silty silence. And I see no other swans to mourn it.
So I continue skimming. I never hit another swan, but I get a marsh hen.
I walk back past lunching ladies and spooning couples, my pockets full of shale and my arm hydraulic, and they don’t fear me one bit.
Tonight:
From the street I hear a loud thud, meshed with a yowling yelp, followed by a grinding skid, deceasing under an idling modern diesel. More idling, then tyre shriek and engine rumble, motoring once more back to silence. I don’t look out the window.
Sometimes two bodies enter the one space. They may meld and harmonise, or they may be immediately repelled. Sometimes a death occurs.
Take care when colliding.
