He stands contiguous to the main pathway, amalgamating seamlessly. Undetected.
Further up the path mother and daughter walk.
Nia holds her daughter's hand. It's too small, smaller now than before, skin stretched over dainty bones. But it's warm, pulse thrumming against her palm. Alive.
Intangible is the child's presence felt, and inexplicably the parkgoers are drawn, if perhaps only fleetingly. It would be a falsehood to say she walks unmarred, that she ever would again. Such calamities could not be denied and the people were likely too jaded to do so. Yet her presence brings something too difficult to name.
It stands undefeated.
And remains.
~o~
He watches from the shadows.
From his pocket he removes the crumpled piece of paper and smoothes it open. Though the images drawn in pencil are adroitly delineated, suggesting a mature hand, the candor of such depiction speaks only to that belonging to a child. Monsters in the dark, sketched in bold with heinous faces. A little girl with tangled hair standing in portent. Shielding the girl from the monsters, from the dark, stands a man in a suit.
In Queensbridge Park the enigmatic man in the shadows looks down at the little girl's sketch on tattered and crumpled paper and does not move until long after mother and daughter's retreating figures have disappeared from sight and the sun has fallen well below the horizon.
Somewhere in the distance the gentle giant smiles.