Central Park

What really surprised him, was that no one else seemed to notice it. They just kept going on with their lives, as if nothing had changed. An odd quality of people, I suppose, is their capacity to ignore the significant.

He was in Central Park when it happened, walking his dog.

The sun went black, but the light continued. The few afternoon shadows changed a bit, almost imperceptably. And then it was dead.

He looked around at all the people still wandering around the park, oblivious of what had just transpired. Oh, to be sure the sun had only been black for a fraction of a second, but wasn't that enough? He could see through these people, see their souls behind their eyes, and suddenly he knew. They had not noticed, because for most of them, humanity had died long ago, before they were born, and they played out their lives in the thrall of some distant genetic memory.

It was only his humanity that had died, just then. Only his light that had been extinguished.

He tried to remember what he had been thinking about, what the last straw had been that killed his soul, that stole heaven from his tenous grasp. It had been the woman. She wasn't blind, or deaf, or crippled, or any other cliched mechanism for causing pity in readers and watchers of bad television programs. She was simply a woman, and he had ignored her, ignored her plight, such as it was. She didn't have kids, that he knew of, but she had a husband. She was slim, attractive, with light brown hair. She was a professional woman, wore tight but conservative skirts, tan with matching jacket, white blouse and coloured contacts. She exercised at the company gym, the same place he did, although he imagined that she did not go there to watch people like herself moving in those spandex shorts, which is what he did. The exercise was secondary. And he had ignored her.

It wasn't a dangerous part of town, and it wasn't late at night. Her carpool: already gone; she had been late. His was the last car in the lot. She tried to flag him down. Did he see her? Yes. Did she know that? No. He kept driving, pretending to be oblivious to her waving arms and her liquid voice, growing ever more dusky as she shouted. It's out of my way, he thought to himself. Too far, she'll just have to walk. All that exercise will pay off.

At home, later that night, with his own wife, their dog, and their television tuned in to Jeapordy! he felt a pang of guilt. He knew what he had done was wrong. He was ashamed, his wife would have been too, had she known. He felt that even the dog would have scolded him, had it been aware of his transgression, of all such transgressions.

She mentioned it to him the next day, as she passed by his cubicle, between hers and the coffee pot. He said he was sorry. He hadn't seen her. The lie ate away ate him as well, but not as much as the night before, and that was when he knew. He couldn't think of anyone that would not have done as he had, but more importantly, he couldn't think of anyone else who would have felt sorry, who would have been ashamed. He asked her if she had made it home alright, and she said yes, but it had been a long walk. Her cellphone was dead, no taxis had stopped. He felt less guilty, but he knew that the end was coming.

And that was what had done it. Weeks later, as he walked his dog through Central Park, he had thought back to that woman, to that late afternoon, to those scalding traces of shame and self-loathing, and couldn't remember what the fuss had been about. Couldn't remember why he had felt bad.

And that was when the sun went out.

It's the little things, I suppose, the small ones, that make us human.