II. Once When the Sky was Outnumbered

There was only one park in town and Roux spent most of his time there. Though some citizens enjoyed taking walks, flying kites, or playing with their children, Roux could usually be found in the park reading a book on one of the wooden benches.

Before leaving his house to go to the park, Roux would run his hands along his many shelves and take a book at random. He needed it to be random. In fact, every night he rearranged the books on the shelves while blindfolded. Making decisions was difficult for Roux and so he decided to let chance dictate what it was that he read.

Book reading was not the only thing chance dictated. Roux’s meals were chosen at random from random menus from various eateries that delivered to his home. Roux did not want to have the responsibility associated with such decisions. If a decision was poor, he’d rather be angry at the silent, allusive god called Chance than at himself.

One this particular morning he was sitting on a bench reading a book on the history of industrial parks. He hadn’t even remembered purchasing the book yet he must have since it had been sitting on his shelf. He had never received a book as a gift even when he had family who would be so inclined to present him with such an item. Roux concluded he must have bought it during one of his rare book-buying binges. Still, he was surprised he hadn’t remembered choosing such a title. Oh well, he thought, it was surely just as good as the rest of them.

It wasn’t a particularly sunny day nor could it really be considered cloudy. It was, Roux thought, somewhere in between the two. The air was neither warm nor cool. It was if the air came from a yet undiscovered season. No wind blew through the park; it was a morning of stillness and Roux was terrified.

He looked down at his book. The words on the page were jumbled. They were begging for wind, begging for something to move it away from Roux’s hands which were too smooth, too unused. The letters, which were previously all English, had somehow been transformed into insidious shapes and sigils foreign to any alphabet Roux had ever seen.

Roux knew the book wanted to disown him. It had altered itself (or had let itself become altered by some outside force invisible to Roux) just to distance itself from him. The book had become an outsider in his hands.

Or, Roux contemplated, it had made him an outsider.

There were other people in the park and Roux knew they were trying to hide their suspicious looks.

He also knew one of those people was going to kill him.

How he knew this, he didn’t know. It was a question Roux could not or would not answer. If the explanation was there inside his mind it was hidden under some unconscious blanket of fear and self-illusion. It was a truth worth hiding from his awareness. It was not a truth that was going to manifest itself like some quant introspective epiphany. Roux simply knew that someone in the vicinity of the bench was going to extinguish his life right there in the park.

But he also knew he could not leave the park.

Leaving would upset things, upset the order that had been predestined by whatever powers moved destinies around like shells in a confidence game. Roux’s fate was sealed in a windless park with a book no longer readable while he was surrounded by people who looked upon him like a pariah. Perhaps they were right in their judgment. Perhaps he was something to be shunned, feared, and slaughtered. Perhaps he was, as he knew some people referred to him as, the “freak on the bench.”

Roux had never considered himself a friendly person or even minimally a social one. His interactions were always brief and without ceremony. He could not remember the last time he had sincerely wished someone a “good morning” yet he could remember dozens of times within the last month in which others had wished him that very thing. His lack of social skills had long ago ceased to bring guilt but he sometimes regretted not being successful in trying to avoid those interactions so that he would not have to meditate on his obscene lack of conformity.

And perhaps now the chickens were coming home to roost, as they say. He was finally going to reap the rewards of his lifestyle or lack thereof: his complete and utter aversion to being bothered.

Roux’s eyes perused each potential assassin in the park. There were two sets of grandparents with their boisterous spawn-of-their-spawn. Could it be them? That would be a nice trick, sending out the least intimidating murderer. Oh, but that would be too obvious, wouldn’t it? No, it was unlikely to be the grandparents. They were too old; you couldn’t count on them to move quickly enough.

But could it be the grandchildren?

There were five of them. It was difficult to tell their ages but Roux thought two looked under three years old while the other three looked to be between ten and twelve, a suitable age to contemplate killing someone like Roux. Yes, it could very well be one, or more, of the children.

He wondered how he would react if it was indeed one of them. Would he embrace death at the hands of a child? After all, who better to exact judgment upon him then a person who is innocent and full of hope and potential? They would simply be making room in the world by snuffing him out. Would they actually comprehend their actions? Would they think it was all a game and that Roux’s death was simply the end of the round? Would they expect him to get up after they had plunged a knife (or pulled a gun’s trigger) and caused his extinction? Roux wondered all of this and found himself even more frightened than before. Youth had never seemed so horrible.

He looked back down at his book.

He was on a new chapter but could not read it due to the previous transformation. To compensate, he imagined it was a chapter about the distribution of goods and how that affected building types in industrial parks. Some of the foreign words were fading on the page while others were blinking to an unknown rhythm. Perhaps they were signaling the return of the wind which would come by and rescue the tome from Roux’s hands.

He wished that was not the case. Despite the danger he knew he was in and the obscurity of the words, he still wanted to read, still wanted to finish the book he had chosen at random on the shelves he had set up randomly the night before. If he was to die before reading the book, he would feel incomplete. Death itself would feel incomplete.

Death would feel unfair.

Roux figured if he was patient and accommodating despite his terror, then maybe things would work out in a complete way.

There was a sound behind him, something that resembled the rustling of leaves. Had the wind returned? Roux looked over his shoulder quickly as if the sound had startled him even though it had not. A part of him wanted to startle the wind so he may have the upper hand in the proceedings.

But it was not leaves being scattered by the wind. It was a young mother with her child. The child, a young girl of about five years old, was taking small toys out of a plastic bag. That it is the sound Roux had heard: small hands grabbing for toys in a plastic bag.

It reminded him of his last surgery. The doctors had searched through his body looking for something, anything, to justify his excruciating pain and their extravagant fees. According to them, they found nothing. That didn’t prevent them from billing Roux in the amount of four-thousand dollars and eighty-three cents which was approximately four-thousand more dollars than Roux really had to spend.

The young girl with the plastic bag stopped rummaging around. She stared at Roux and brought her hand up. Her palm opened, revealing the toy she had chosen. It was a mechanical duck.

“Quack quack,” the girl said. “Quack quack.”

Roux was petrified. His body tensed and he was back in surgery, unable to move. Someone was going to try to heal him: the little girl or the doctor or both. He didn’t know nor did he care to think about it.

“Just do it already,” Roux said, directing the words to the girl and to the doctor if he was somehow listening in the windless air.

“Quack,” the girl said.

“That’s what I thought.” Roux let his book slide out of his fingers and fall to the concrete.