22

Rowan walked through the trees, casting a shadow out onto the roadway that grew and shrank, formed and flickered with every step. Passersby would see the light flick across their eyes and glance up only to see the retreating form. At the edge of the greenspace, Rowan step determinedly onto the asphalt and crossed to the sidewalk that led to the busier throughways of the city. As Rowan was soon swallowed by the growing crowds, all that was left to mark Rowan’s passing was the crumpled ball of paper at the bottom of the forest-green trash receptacle that the city’s park departments had designed to vaguely resemble shrubbery.

Across the park, Gareth was also emerging onto the path that led back to his apartment. It ran lazily between rows of suburban-style homes, all with yards facing the green space. Gareth could sense the tension in the gates and fences: owners wanted to enjoy the beauty of the park and its trees but at the same time were  trying desperately to avoid providing ripe pickings for the imagined cut-purses and rapists that inhabit the forests of everyone’s mind.

Emerging from the lane, he skipped lightly across the deserted street and turned onto the avenue. Gareth smiled to himself as he glanced down the street. This was the road he’d met the beaver on. It had been one of those days, not long after he had moved into the apartment. He had fallen into himself. Loneliness was one of those insidious manifestations. It crept up slowly on an unsuspecting victim until he was unknowingly trapped in its net, and then would come crashing down like a piano dropped from the fourth floor and render the victim insensible. Gareth was pretty sure it had been a Bösendorfer concert grand, complete with a bench and a pianist who needed to go on a diet. He still remembered the Vaseline-lens effect that had shrouded everything as he stumbled out and away from what had seemed like a minuscule, vermin-ridden hole (he had really been sick of staring at his bedroom ceiling). Then suddenly, at the end of the next street, his bloodshot, rheumy eyes had glanced up and there was a beaver. Sitting on the side of the road. Looking like he belonged there and pretty much ignored by the smudgy figures Gareth could perceive passing to and fro. It was a sign of how far he had been gone that Gareth’s first thoughts were of how soft the beaver’s fur looked when it was dry: Gareth had  one of those mini-epiphanies about how the fur trade must have arisen after some Frenchman in a lumberjack jacket first encounter a Canadian beaver sunning himself under a sugar maple. Just as Gareth’s incoherence threatened to block out even the beaver’s presence, the beaver sat back on his haunches, reached out a forelimb beckoningly and tilted his head with the most unusual smile Gareth had ever seen. So Gareth took him home.

And home they had both stayed. It had had all made so much sense at the time. And while Gareth regretted not a moment of it, it was definitely looking to be one of the highlights of his as yet unstarted memoirs.

And on that note, Gareth mused to himself, I ought to be home. And so he went.