swimming ducks & fire trucks

          Bus brakes squealed as it lurched to a stop by the curb. Doors hissed open and a pudgy six year old  boy lowered himself awkwardly to the sidewalk. His father followed behind him. Just as pudgy and with only a foot of height over his son and stiff knees, the man struggled down to the ground as awkwardly as the boy, then waved an absent thank you to the driver as the bus doors swung closed.
  Father and son looked like twins born twenty years apart. Their eyes were sunken and empty, their hands made of clumsy dough and their thoughts were all simple. Their skin was pale from winter but sprinkled with freckles and their hair was orange. They looked like fat leprechauns and were harmless in every way.
          Turning from the bus stop, the father and son walked through open iron gates and along a paved pathway. A city park stretched out in front of them. The sun was warmer than expected so early in the spring and green buds had appeared on all the trees. The air smelled like fresh flowers and food vendors and green grass and all the things a city park should be when winter has come to an end.
The man held his son’s hand and they walked together into the park along the edge of a pond.
“What they doin’?” said the boy, his stubby finger out straight towards a group of ducks in the pond, white tails straight up, waving like feathered sailboats.
“Prolly they eatin’ something,” the man explained, “Or maybe they hidin.’”
His son glanced up at him, his fat face pinched against the brightness of the sun, then looked away, satisfied.
“Ducks got what they call a predator,” the man said after a moment, “Hawks and cats and things, and they gotta get away somewhere.”
Both of their minds wandered.
They passed a young family sitting on park benches with a girl who spoke excitedly in some other language and played with her mother’s cell phone. Her parents sat beside her and read books.
“What she got?” asked the boy, and pointed at the little girl.
“Tha’s a telephone.”
They kept walking.
They bought soda from a vendor in the park and the drinks came in paper cups with ice. The boy sucked quietly at his straw as they walked. The man wanted to feel the coolness of the ice against his lips and popped the top off his drink. He tipped it back too quick and a stumbling line of cola trickled out of the corner of this mouth and down the front of his T-Shirt. He brushed his shirt with his hand, embarrassed, but the dark mark had already set in. The boy stared at the stain.
Drawing away attention, the man pointed to the opposite edge of the park, “Look at the lights, there’s fire trucks down there!” He knew how his son liked fire trucks.
The boy whipped his head around and his doughy jaw fell open. “Le’s go look.”
They crossed the park and the man finished his soda as he walked. The boy carried his cup but was too focused on the growing red lights to drink.
They passed through the park gates and out to the sidewalk, where they could see the trucks clearly. The vehicles were parked around a street corner and firemen and a few police officers were standing around them. They had blocked off traffic in all directions and stood staring up at a fire escape between the third and fourth floors of a brick apartment building. An old woman stood on the iron stairs of the fire escape and wept, looking out at the park and then down at the asphalt and the men. She wore a delicate evening gown and her white hair was pulled back into a tight bow. If she were not alone on the side of the building, she’d look ready to go to an opera or a nice restaurant, thought the man.
  The woman stopped crying for a moment, her face went rigid, and then she tipped forward, over the railing and head first to the ground below.
The crowd gasped as one and turned their gaze away. But the man and his son stood still. They did not move. The man could see her figure frozen in his mind halfway down to the ground, the dress pulled sideways in the wind and her hands open, grasping at nothing. The image stayed for moment longer and he wished she could float like that forever.
Then the curse broke and the man pulled his son away and rushed back through the park gates. The red lights dimmed behind them. Their pace slowed but neither spoke. The man looked straight ahead and felt unable to put his feelings into words or even thoughts and he wondered if his boy saw it happen.
  “I wan’ another soda,” said the boy, looking down into his empty cup.
  But his father was far away. His eyes were on the ducks, now waddling up on shore, quacking absently to each other, and he wondered for the first time if he had a clue what he was talking about.