Some inexorable urge has brought him here at this hour, the taciturn lull preceding the frenetic city evening. He chases down the lucent heat of personal nostalgia, which is a man’s most guarded and intimate creation. Though, it is also his loneliest, an isolated nave he visits and fills with sorrow: why do I return here? why am I incapable of navigating the maps of immediacy?

Wissahickon Creek glitters with what waning, stray sunlight sneaks through the bountiful deciduous: elm and oak and beech and dogwood and birch. Summer is just beginning to abscise into autumn. With each revolution, the day is imperceptibly ceding a minute to the nighttime. In three months, he thinks, this luminous hour will be shrouded in darkness.

He walks alone along the hard packed dirt trail. The air is dense, rank with the fecund smell of water and soil. The odds of his being here are slim but not improbable. The confluence of circumstances that have led to this late afternoon stroll are innumerable, and a novel of indefinite length would not succeed in enumerating all of them. Let it suffice to say, then, that in the last months he has narrowly skirted death without knowing it on several occasions, blithely saved by forgotten car keys and ill-fitting shoes and faulty umbrellas. In serendipitous and contingent ways, objects provide unwitting and thankless salvation.

There is also the matter of his employment at a suburban bookstore: today he was scheduled for an afternoon shift, but a burst water vein has sprung him, unexpectedly. Lastly, there is his reason for venturing into Philadelphia at all: an old college friend, passing through in transit to Boston, staying for dinner. Even here, unforeseeable fortuity is at work. Traffic on the Schuylkill was miraculously light; his friend’s train has been delayed an hour (a sixteen year old girl has thrown herself onto the tracks just north of Wilmington, extinguishing an incommensurable palate of desire and pleasure and love and suffering; on the train, meetings and meals and orgasms are put on hold, and these slight urges momentarily transfigure into empathy, agitation, the fleeting song of mortality pulling at the mind).

He allows himself to walk a few lucid moments down an egress, out of his own head. He can hear the sibilant traffic on Lincoln Drive, intruding, and isn’t the proximity a shame? An older man jogs past in flimsy shorts, his quadriceps taut and gaunt, and is he good in bed? A man and a very young girl survey the trail ahead, the man is white, he is tall and lean with dark hair; the girl is black, she is wearing a vibrant red shirt and her hair is a pure ebony color, she keeps kicking the sandals off her feet and the man keeps putting them back on, and aren’t they a peculiar pair?

He tries to will himself to perceive the surroundings, to notice each tree, each shift in scent, each new timbre of the wind.

But this is too much, and he retracts.

He was on the Schuylkill, and the phone conversation was brief; no mention of the girl’s ruined body on the tracks, just mild and sincere agitation over the delay. Plans were changed, and the Lincoln/ Kelly Drive exit was announcing itself in signs, and some ineffable shift - perhaps a scent from the river, or a glint of light on a hubcap, or a forbidden glimpse of the Philadelphia skyline over the tops of the trees – triggered an opaque, shrouded memory of Michaela. It was something he needed to unravel, and as he descended into the verdant, somnolent heart of Fairmount Park, he thought, I am being pulled on a current that is entirely external, that is not of my own making.

~

The path – how long have people trodden away the earth along this creek? - crosses the water at a wide stone bridge. He stops and rests his weight against the ill-formed stones, his body poked and prodded by the subtle cornices and edges. He thinks, as he often does, that such decisions – to chase an old lover into a memory – are in someway pre-ordained and inevitable; that each minor decision bends our arc very slightly towards this confluence with the past. He thinks that the fibers of his body have known, since their inception, that he would be here, on this bridge on this late summer afternoon, mourning a woman. Then he thinks this strange feeling of prescience is a result of hindsight and the human need for linearity.

The wind rises, and there is a portent of the advancing barrenness whispering in its high octave and latent chill.

He wonders, What remains when a memory ineluctably drowns under time? The particulars of a place and a person abrade like a piece of glass tossed in the ocean surf.

The wind stagnates, and summer re-establishes its tenuous domain.

What words did they share? When did Michaela’s hair loose itself and fall into his mouth? and what was his precise physical reaction? What were his apprehensions about work and family and love? his hopes? Had the Phillies won the night before?

What remains is a synthetic sort of absence. He had felt some form of transcendence, some measure of deliverance from the quotidian rhythm of his life. That knowledge, having lost its hard empiricism, lingers liminally, like an essential word just beyond a poet’s grasp. If it can only be discovered, he believes, all the entropy that has been wrought will cohere. And he either searches frantically, or he resigns himself to disorder.

He looks down into the creek, its sinewy body already beginning to fill with the fluttering, almost weightless embers of dead leaves. The disorder of his life is not omniscient. He is single and childless while a majority of his friends are not. He has loved and lost multiple women. He was a poet but now he has given up writing. But the great absences of his life have become a kind of presence: contentment is a real possibility, but even beauty requires context. When his life is so inconsequentially small, why couldn’t it be possible to find a transitory happiness?

He turns back to the trail. A woman is perched on the opposite side of the bridge, and a small flock of children – too old to be her own – play rambunctiously along the trail, spilling recklessly into the untrammeled nature of the forest.

“Hey,” the woman calls out, “don’t go too far away. Your mom will kill me if you get hurt.”

She is short with pronounced hips, narrow eyes, a few extra pounds, and charcoal hair. She unleashes a furtive, suggestive smile in his direction, deliciously uncomfortable in her body. How old is she? he wonders. He possesses an unusual affinity for women like this: starkly unbeautiful; women carrying an extra twenty pounds; women with agrestic faces and broad shoulders; women with stolid thighs, their movements bereft of any elegance.

They are not homely. She is not homely. But her evasion of classical loveliness speaks to him of some spiritual fortitude, perhaps even some maternal warmth. She glances surreptitiously at him once, twice more. He feels the heavy, quickened cadence of his rapacious heart. Places are not inanimate things, however. We populate them with semblances. Michaela is in the abundant trees and in the smell of the creek. He realizes that he does not know one thing of her life after these years. She is nothing more than a semblance in the forest of his memory.

A man and a small girl come between him and this voluptuous woman, the peculiar pair from earlier. He pays them little attention: she is a galloping streak of red and ebony hair; he is simply a sentence, “Come on, and we’ll get that ice cream,” and then they are down the trail and they are nothing, and the woman whose hips he could grow to love throws him one last, generous smile.

He has a drive ahead of him, dinner and drinks with a rarely seen friend.

~

Three weeks later he sits in the kitchen reading the Inquirer. The morning light is callow and thin. A cold front has dispersed the summer humidity, and the air smells faintly of cider. His dinner went unremarkably, and he has already forgotten even its most vivid ephemera. The woman on the bridge has fallen into the ever deepening wilderness of his memory; she now resides only in the sight of dying leaves lying inertly in water.

He glances briefly at the Local News section before passing over and delving into the sports page. The Phillies are marching toward the playoffs, a pleasant and necessary distraction. He has reconvened with the mundane music of his life. His thoughts are consumed by the looming prospect of another winter alone, by a concussive rattle coming from his car’s transmission, by the security deposit on his new apartment, by the sprawling poetry he is just beginning to write again.

He misses a brief story beneath the fold of the Local News’ front page; a story buried in favor of articles about the city’s decision to close six libraries, the regional decline in standardized test scores, and flooding along the Delaware River’s northern banks:

Body found in Fairmount Park

A man jogging off trail on Wednesday discovered a partially decomposed body in the woods near Wissahickon Creek. The body was a young, African-American female, approximately five years old. An autopsy revealed the cause of death to be asphyxiation. The body showed signs of sexual abuse. Traces of semen were found on her underwear. Police currently have no suspects.

~

In the long hours before dawn, the creek glitters with moonlight, glitters harvest vermillion, though not a soul is present to witness such luminescence.