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.
Alex Jovanović is a writer and visual artist. He was born in Seattle and is currently studying creative writing in Melbourne. His work tackles themes of social conformity and takes influence from George Saunders.