4. Order
Year round, the secluded park amongst period homes exhibited its array of broadleaf trees and its ornamental lake and its manicured lawn and the young widow who walked back and forth twenty-three metres between two mature oaks, no matter what anyone thought.
Always two hours pacing with headphones and sunglasses and always that same narrow stage. Grasses faded as she wore in a straight path of dirt and dust and sand with her thirty-two steps north, then her thirty-two steps south. Through winter and spring she rugged right up. A drumming summer storm locked all the kids screening indoors but still she was out sweating and dripping in the mud. Autumnal leaves obscured the path but her small boots found their way to each mark of the rehearsal, sweeping as they went.
Pensioners griped, gossiped. And not just those who lived by the park. They complained about the damage with spitting speeches. She didn’t intermit to listen. The naysayers gathered members and momentum and attention. When a councilman put his hand out, she walked through him and through the next who said excuse me and Madam.
A distant meeting determined she should be let be. Because anyway how could they politely stop her pacing back and forth, to and fro, back and forth? A rustling metronome for a space that prohibited all other music. Nothing delayed the oak-to-oak shuttle – back, fro, to, forth.
After she’d been at it for who knows how many years a celebratory paragraph was added to the park’s Wikipedia page, but users kept editing and deleting, toing and froing, unable to agree upon her pseudonym. A plaque was made by the council but misplaced and never installed. Robins watched her pace from their perches until both oaks were damaged by the wind and removed and replaced with several saplings, but down towards the ornamental lake, so her line in the lawn seemed arbitrarily drawn.
Quite soon after that she disappeared, and the park and the path lived on with civil order restored. The council tried again to reseed the grass but it never took, so her work could still be spotted on satellite pictures – a mysterious scar in the lawn.
Her fate ever unsolved, old tenants remembered and wondered together as seasons came and went, until the park was redeveloped into five apartment buildings amid a great controversy of protests and investigations and trials and jailings, and no one ever thought of that young widow again.