In the corporate city park outside a tall glass office building in the middle of the city, a middle-aged man on his lunch sits in the sun with his spine straightened against the back of a metal bench.

The sun simmers behind a thick layer of low gray clouds. White smoke from a fire somewhere in Canada fills the park in a humid haze. The weight of the heat and the vision-constricting smoke make sitting in the park feel like the inside of a fishbowl.

A robin perches in its nest in the fork of a sparsely canopied maple sapling. It swivels its neck to the left and then to the right. It maneuvers its body around by forty-five degrees inside its nest with agile, vertical hops—as if the walls of the nest extend upward to the sky.

The man presses a button on his phone. He listens to the same song he’s played four times since the morning.

It begins with the familiar shoo-wop strum of an acoustic guitar. A ghostlike theremin haunts the chorus.

The man relaxes his stomach. It bulges out over the lip of his pants. Short hairs poke through the thin, slippery nylon fabric of a gray polo. The shirt brushes over patches of dry skin as the man adjusts how he sits.

A breeze blows gently through the park. It pushes his hair to a ridiculous angle and tickles his cheek. It cools the skin creased between his jaw and his neck.

The man increases the volume to the song with his thumb as the front man sings about death.

But for now we are young / Let us lay in the sun / And count every beautiful thing—

The lyrics are cut short. His phone screen illuminates with the picture of a young woman in a knee-length dress smiling in a field of sunflowers.

“Good afternoon, dear.” “Good. Slow, but good. You?”

The robin stands up on the tips of its clawed feet and cranes its neck forward.

“What’s been keeping you busy?” “Uh-huh.” “Uh-huh.” “How old?” “Well, it sounds like you handled the situation well.” “Me? Support letters the rest of the afternoon I think.” The man brushes lunch crumbs he didn’t see before he left his desk away from his knees.

On another bench on the opposite end of the park, the thin body of a young man who is experiencing homelessness aches. He stands up and stretches his muscles. With a grumbling sigh, he puts one foot in front of the other until he manages a slow, irregular pace. He rambles along the long looping ribbon of concrete that marks the boundary of the park, combing the grass along the way with the toe of his shoe.

“No, I haven’t asked yet.” “I don’t know if this is the best time to—.” “I know.” “I know.” “Are we sure this is what needs to—.” “Yes.” “The gray one.” “Yes.” “I know.” “I will.” “Uh-huh.” “She said fifteen thousand.” “Yes.” “OK.” “You, too. Bye-bye.”

The man takes a deep breath and sits back against the bench. He thumbs a button to restart his song.

The man imagines the thin blade of an axe hovering inches over his neck like a guillotine, poised delicately in the curved space between his chin and collarbone. He feels the flat wooden collar of stocks around his throat, feels the cold steel pull at his skin.

What a beautiful face / I have found in this place / that is circling all ‘round the sun

The man who is experiencing homelessness creeps closer to the middle-aged man on the bench. He feels inside his pockets for something. He stops on the sidewalk and picks at the collar of his sneaker.

What a beautiful dream / that could flash on the screen / In a blink of an eye and be gone from me / Soft and sweet / Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

The man on the bench thinks about the hundred or so paths of life he never took. His mind goes blank. An acidic lump the weight of a tangerine forms in his throat. He lifts his chin, so his neck arches forward slightly. He imagines again that it presses against the edge of something sharp. He imagines a pinprick of blood seeping from under his skin.

And one day we will die / And our ashes will fly / From the aeroplane over the sea / But for now—

A shadow crosses over the man’s face. Looming in front of him, a young man with dust on his shoes squares his body and hesitates.

“You listening to something?”

The man on the bench stops his music. He looks at the younger man in his eyes. He thinks they look glossy and red.

“Come again?”

“You listening to something?”

"Oh, yes, I am—I mean—was." The man on the bench shifts around on his seat, suddenly noticing how the wooden slats are pinching his bottom. He asks flatly, “What’s up?” Meaning, ‘what do you want’.

“I only ever listen to like Jimmy Paige.” The young man continues. “Never listened to much else, ya know. Well, sometimes I listen to Beethoven too. That’s the good stuff. Beethoven and Jimmy Paige.”

The man on the bench takes the headphones out of his ears and sets them in his lap.

“Yeah, those are some good—I mean, that’s good music to listen to. They’re classics.”

The young man laughs to himself through his nose. He smiles beautifully. “Ya know, it’s funny. Actually, it’s pretty ironic. Last time I was listening to Beethoven, wanna know what, is the last time I—” he begins again.

From the corner of his eye, the man on the bench thinks he can make out the shape of a familiar head of hair, a woman stepping out from the office building.

“Well, whenever I was living in Germany, I would listen to stuff like Beethoven and, it’s interesting for me because if there’s one word to describe how I’ve lived or learned life up to like Monday or Tuesday, it was phenomenology. And listening to like German music in Germany, you know?” He smiles and chuckles nervously to himself again. The man on the bench waits silently. “But yeah, I like listening to that stuff—the classics. Yeah.”

Relenting briefly, the man on the bench asks, “How long were you living in Germany?”

He notices the woman completely now. He’s certain he recognizes her blouse. She is walking toward the pair of them along the sidewalk with her hand up to her ear.

“Germany? Oh, I was in Berlin for a few months and then Hamburg and Dresden. So, I think I was in Germany for maybe a year? No, two years? Either way, yeah, it was ok living in Germany. But, yeah, never go to Berlin, just so you know. Berlin sucks.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Maybe 2014, I think. I don’t know,” he laughs.

“How old were you?”

“Oh, man. Probably 19 or something like that, yeah.”

The woman stops and pivots ninety degrees in the middle of the walk and gestures with her free hand away from herself.

With a pained look on his face, the man on the bench makes a show of looking at his watch. He fiddles with his headphones in his lap. The young man looks down at his own wrist and pulls at a paper bracelet adhered to the coarse hairs on his arm.

“Well, hey man, I’ll let you get back to listening to Beethoven. Only—well, the thing is, I’ve kind of been out here in the park a while. You know of anywhere to eat?”

As the young man is still speaking, the man on the bench sits forward and reaches into his back pocket. He peers into it and winces to himself. He pulls out a twenty-dollar bill and extends it out to the young man. The young man hesitates for a moment, then grabs the bill.

“Oh, well, yeah. Okay. Thanks.”

“There’s a good sandwich place back toward the river.” The man on the bench says. He turns in his spot and points over his shoulder to the north and west. “Periwinkle’s. Great tuna fish salad.”

“Yeah, all right. Periwinkle’s. Well, hey, thanks.”

“Oh, please don’t mention it.”

The man on the bench stands to watch as the young man strides toward the river. He lets the young man get several yards away before he begins to retreat from the bench himself.

As he turns to the left to follow the sidewalk away from his office, he glances over his right shoulder.

The woman on her phone looks to be twenty yards away. She is closing the space between them. She is angled with her body facing where he had just been sitting.

The air in the city park is heavy with white smog. The robin sits low in its nest and trills out a warning chirp to its mate.

He thinks she may have seen him sitting there before. He can’t be sure. He doesn’t remember grabbing his headphones from where he set them on the bench. The man unconsciously holds his breath.

He picks up his pace and walks along the left side of the walk.

He stops.

He looks back for a second. She is moving quickly through the smoke with her eyes on the ground, stepping around goose droppings and wet leaves.

He crosses the street where there is a parking garage bordered by a dense line of bushes.

He crouches behind the bushes. The cuff of his khaki pant legs lift, exposing the lower part of his shins to the unseasonably warm air. He is wearing gray dress socks that are paper-thin and stretched tightly over his ankles.

The woman walks briskly past, keeping pace until the outline of her body is softened and blurred behind a wall of haze. Her footsteps fade into the sounds of the city.

The man sighs. He stands up and pulls his pant legs away from his knees until the bottom seam falls at the right spot above his dress shoes. He reaches into his pockets and feels around in them. He feels his phone and a quarter and some lint. He doubles back to the bench, glancing every so often behind him.

The spot on the bench where he thinks he left his headphones is empty. They were dropped, perhaps, in his hurry to get away. Or, he thinks, someone had come by and, seeing them there in the open, picked them up and carried them away.

The man tightens his belt in frustration and sets his feet in the direction of his cubicle, toward the wall of glass. He reaches the courtyard that cowers under the enormity of his workplace. He considers informing the corporate security about the theft of his headphones.

I watch the man go into the building from a bistro table in the courtyard. A few minutes later, I gather up my own work things to follow him inside. I stop at the door.

The bodies of a mourning dove and a house finch lie dead on the white concrete sidewalk beneath the solid glass wall of the financial office building. My mother cries, “The poor babies,” in my head as I stand over their bodies.

“They flew into the glass just like the last one.”

A man in a boilersuit stands next to me.

I feel an irrational twinge of anger at the men who built such an obvious death trap for birds.

The man in the boilersuit bends his knees and unceremoniously scrapes the house finch up with the blade of a shovel and dumps its body into the open mouth of a trash bin set on a dolly that he pulls behind him.

He bends his knees again, and the edge of the shovel nudges underneath the mourning dove’s shoulder, just where the muscle of its wings is thickest. The shovel pushes its body across the ground without lifting so much as an inch.

The bird’s head, limp and heavy as an infant’s, drags against the ground, stubbornly refuses to follow the rest of its body now reposed on the cold steel flat of the shovel. It hangs off the shovel’s edge at the neck and dangles with the weight of unconsciousness. Its eyelids are small and grey.

“Birds is dumb,” The man in the boilersuit says as he wipes his shovel blade off with a rag he has pulled from his hip pocket. His thinning white hair rustles in a sudden gentle breeze. The tanned white skin of his arms beads with perspiration under a thin canopy of hair.

“Yes.” I agree. “They are.”