Unfirom, hands folded behind his back, was studying the crowd at the tennis court. None of these came within the bounds of his assignment, but this changed sometimes after a single lob.
He felt a sense of foreboding, perhaps involving tennis, perhaps not. Anyone who dealt regularly with phronik felt foreboding every few hours in any case. Unless the full company was in view, what they might be up to was a worry to wrinkle even an angel’s brow.
Turning, he set off across the grass to the other end of the park, and the softball diamond. The foreboding built: a lot of it seemed concentrated around a red cardboard rectangle at the far curve of the track. This turned out to be a discarded container half filled with fries from Booty Burger. Two torn packets of ketchup nearby were drawing ants. Not a single phron was here to gorge herself.
His head came up, turning slowly. That meant they were busy at something: a more interesting discard, like ice cream, or another batch of hopeless cookies in the kitchen, or something serious. His gaze took in 360degrees of the park and its environs.
Then he was running forward, his old days as a guardian angel bursting out in his voice. “Wait!”
He was there in less than a second, and was still too late. His forehead hit the invisible barrier that marked the end of his domain and he froze in mid-stride. Now he shouted, “Don’t wait! Hurry!” He knew she couldn’t hear him, but the full force of his will was behind the call.
The woman running diagonally across the street was moving as fast as she could. She was on the center line when the florist’s truck came around the blind corner, moving far too fast. She might still have made it but for the trailing end of the banner she had clutched in her arms. A foot landed on one corner.
“Yehapsekatory!” she shouted, falling backward. Unfirom knew at once how pleased she would be at such unconventional last words.
The truck sent her spinning and sped on, barely missing a man who had also run into the street. The man stared after the truck for a moment and then dropped to one knee beside the woman. He shouted something even less coherent than what she had said, and ran to a nearby door. It occurred to Unfirom that the developer should have remembered there was a public phone in the fieldhouse. But it didn’t matter.
“Aw, gee!”
“Some people just can’t handle love!”
Unfirom turned. The four phronik looked up at him, mouths tiny and eyes huge, their hands behind their backs. He didn’t need to ask, he supposed. “Was this your doing?”
“We were just seein’ if we could do something for the park,” said Bluebell, hips wiggling.
“And for them!” Primrose put in. “They would have had fun, too!”
“Havin’ plenty of fun now, aren’t they?” said Meadow Saffron, leaning over on one side to peer past the angel at the gathering crowd.
“Aw!” The tears dropping off Sweet Pea’s cheeks were about as big as her ears. “We didn’t mean for any old truck to come by!”
“This is what happens when you try to move outside your assignments,” Unfirom intoned.
Bluebell sniffed. “Well, she’s the one who ran. If she’d stood still, we’d’ve had her!”
“Him too,” murmured Meadow Saffron.
Sweet Pea looked behind her, rubbing her fists into her cheeks to grind the tears away. “No, we’ll never forget her. We’ll weep for her forever!”
Primrose looked over at her. “For who?”
Sweet Pea’s damp right hand waved toward the street. “Oh, yu know! Her! What’s her….”
“Peter Cottontail!” cried Bluebell.
“That will not bring her back,” the angel told them.
“Well, it’s a gesture,” said Meadow Saffron, chin up.
“So’s this,” said Bluebell, moving her hand in a signal not associated with angels.
Unfirom opened his mouth to speak, but Sweet Pea cried, “Oooh! The ambulance!”
The developer was there to watch the young lady being loaded in. He leaned forward. “Of course I’ll remember you!” he said, voice choking on relief.
His relief was misplaced. Unfirom new he had the right idea, but the wrong ghost. “You have….”
Turning, the angel saw the phronik had discovered a dissolving ice cream sandwich on one of the benches. Wrong to blame them for leaving, he knew: their attention spans were brief, and they had seen worse accidents in and around the park, though very few of their own making.
Perhaps the woman had been destined to die today in any case. Unfirom did not feel any lightening of his feeling of failure. And it might work out for the best: the developer might change his ways, or at least his designs, in some small way, remembering the activist. He glanced at the police car pulling up, and the young man I the formerly immaculate suit rushing to talk to them.
Just there, between Unfirom and the police car, there appeared the briefest image of a dark pinstripe suit. No head appeared above it, and the suit was gone at once.
Very little remained of August N. Griese in the park that bore his name. Only Unfirom ever saw him, and then only when the light was right, generally at dusk. But something of him remained, imploring young lovers to remember him. Unless he was addressing that admonition to Unfirom which it was impossible to determine.
Griese had been a busy man in life, far too busy for young love, middle-aged ove, or love late in life. He died, as he had feared, leaving no one to remember him, except in dry business connections. His will endowed the park, for lack of anything else to do with the money, and it was the only place on earth close enough to him to claim even a fragment of his ghost.
Unfirom had thought all along that he was doing a good job as Griese’s guardian angel. Hriese (funny how he could never think of the man as Gus, or even August) had been kept from the more serious forms of disease or injury, and any danger of crime or heartbreak. After Griese’s death, however, he was informed that his performance had left much to be desired. Guarding his charge from life’s unpleasant surprises had gone far enough to ensure the man enjoyed very little life at all. This assignment was the result of that performance evaluation.
The ambulance was gone. The developer was helping bundle the stained banner into the back of the squad car. He was talking far too much and too quickly, but it didn’t matter. The sympathetic cop had stopped taking notes some time ago, and was now just listening. The developer was asking what would happen to the banner when the investigation was concluded, and wondering whether he could have it.
Unfirom shook his head. In the distance, he could hear the ambulance’s siren, backing the phronik as they sang.
“Cousin Kenneth made a wax with oily streaks
Which made a candle burn for nearly eighty weeks;
To make a million dollars should have been a lark,
Tom Edison came forth and left him in the dark;
Percolator, coffeemaker,
Subaru and Studebaker;
All ya got is all yer gonna get:
Waddya bet?”
-end-
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