New York Short Stories by Peter Carlaftes (ed) & Kat Georges (ed)

Author:Peter Carlaftes (ed) & Kat Georges (ed)
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: detective, mystery, noir, anthology
ISBN: 9780989512527
Publisher: Three Rooms Press
Published: 2014-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

A PARK BENCH FOR TWO

BY PAUL SOHAR

An elderly gentleman in a raincoat, rather short but not bent in the back, enters Central Park from West Seventy-second Street. On his way to the plaza he sits down on a bench with a copy of The New York Times in his lap. The other end of the bench is already occupied by a young man wearing a pinstripe suit and a lavender Hello Kitty T-shirt. His legs are spread out in front and his arms are on the back of the bench, leaving little room for the newcomer. Although green is beginning to enliven the trees, it’s a cloudy and coolish day, not ideal park weather. The usual parade of nannies with kids and strollers is not on. A quiet spot in a noisy city. Five minutes pass before the young man speaks without looking at his bench mate.

“Anything exciting in the paper?”

Silence. The traffic noise of Central Park West seems to come from another city in another land. The taxis honk, the buses buzz as they lumber out into the flow of cars, but these distant sounds have nothing to do with the park bench.

Finally the elderly gentlemen pipes up.

“It depends on what excites you.”

First the young man nods to the park in general before he turns to face his bench partner.

“Anything more about the Incredible Shrinking Man?”

“Never heard of it.”

“It was all over the news a couple of days ago. It seems, every morning this oldish gent, a frightened looking little geezer with a lot to worry about, he makes his appearance in a different corner of Central Park, dressed in nothing but a dirty old T-shirt and a pair of sneakers. And then he proceeds, with sincere earnestness, to display his shrinking part to every passerby, explaining how big it was in the arms of the night and even tries teasing it back to life. Didn’t you read about it?”

“No,” is the curt answer from the elderly gentleman.

“Obviously,” the young man goes on, spinning the story in a leisurely way. “Obviously, the show attracts a few squealing nannies and the grinning park workers until the cops finally haul him off. By then he starts howling about the pills he gets in jail and how they fail to stop his incredible shrinking and by the next day, he says, he’s no bigger than a rat, and why do you people want him to turn into that? Aren’t there enough rats in the city already? He screams at the cops. And more, like: ‘If not, then look at me now, take a good look before I fall through a sewer grate, and before you good folks blow up into huge balloons, filled with the fumes and farts of the streets . . . ’ It was on TV, the show he puts on. I saw it the other night. Didn’t you?”

“No.”

“By then the nannies move on,” the young man is undeterred by the lack of interest in his news item; it’s like he’s rehearsing for an audition.

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