As in:
On the first bitter cold day of winter three boys from Lost Horn Creek elementary improvised with stones and pine branches what they imagined a game of curling would be like. Because the ice had not ripened, it gave way when the oldest and heaviest of the three tried to retrieve a stone that had slid yards past its mark. When his mates tried to help, they too fell in, and all would have drowned except that Wanda Mears, an off-duty paramedic and herself the mother of three young children, spotted the unfolding tragedy from her passing truck. She got as close to the lake as she could in her truck, slammed the passenger side into a snow bank, and bravely went in after the three boys. She saved two, but perished in the icy green water while she was trying to rescue the third.
To the people of Bishop County it was an unfathomable tragedy, such that even those given to say that God has a reason for everything could not find words to console each other. The pain of the loss created an epic silence. So they resolved to build a park, Wanda Mears Memorial Park, on a three acre hill between the school and the lake. Because it was all they could think to do.
On a lush May afternoon, the day Wanda would have turned 33, an old man wearing a Milwaukee Braves cap and an orange Dickies t-shirt sat on the granite bench at the top of the hill and sobbed quietly about not being able to finish his novel. He had fallen deeply in love with his lead character, but now he knew that he had suffocated her in the Gordian knot of his plot. It surprised him that the pain of all this imagination could be so real to him, and that it burned his eyes.
He was followed by a 14-year-old girl, only Bishop County’s third lip and nose studded Goth, who’d painted everything in her life black except her blue eyes. She sat on the bench and cried with the pain of not being accepted, even though her uniforms rejected acceptance as capably as they swallowed every passing photon. Then she dined on the pain, bravely accepted the irony, and resolved to steal her iPod back.
She was followed by a six month-old beagle, Freddie, who’d escaped through a hole in a picket fence and found his way to the park by chasing butterflies and parachuting milkweed spores. It took three tries for Freddie to mount the slippery surface of the bench, but once he did he quickly fell asleep.
By then a waxing moon had risen, and the young girl who couldn’t eat, or do her homework, or give up looking for her puppy, found hope in the sight of a dog’s ear hanging over the end of the bench.
“There you are Freddie!” she yelled. “There you are.”
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