D, a master of anecdote, ironic or sentimental, quirky and always clear-sighted, was relating a story, one of the million told about Ecocity, about a park preserved right in its heart.
After all these years, my reading is still so hasty, sloppy that it misconstrues meaning until a third or fourth reading. He was telling me, I thought, that on his birthday he was walking there and came across a mature woman whose hair, snowy and pulled back, demarked her as the momentary, magical incarnation of a swan who resides at the park's lake.
Another swan, I was misgathering from his tale, had been shot, darted-down by an unknown, sinister hunter, and because of that this swan had taken human form to solve the mystery of who'd done it and to bring the murderer to justice.
The story continued, this veer finding the Swan Lady and D together coming upon a man crouching over the corpse of a duck hen. The Crouching Man told them the duck had been attacked by several drakes and left lying at the lip of this pond where they stood.
My imagination leaped to the conclusion that the Crouching Man was the same as the Swan Hunter, and that he created this ruse in order to evade capture. As it turned out, D was relating literal events, literal avian deaths, in the literal surround of Palace Park in Ecocity.
It was only I who concocted this potential myth, turning brute happening into a capacious world of mystery needed only for the psychological balance of young children, 'rest-home' inmates, and myself.
I am incapable of understanding the world as it is.
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