David Hollander Still Life He stands on an asphalt path that winds its way through the park. The path is cut into the side of a hill, and surrounded by trees. Below him, on his left, there is a playground, stocked with all the necessities: swings hanging from rusted chains; a slide descending into a patch of red mud; see-saws offering their seductive potential energy. It is morning, and the yellow sunlight pours down upon this paradigm, liquid and divine. But the path, and thus the man, are covered in the hillside's gray-blue shadow. It is a division he doesn't dare to transgress. His entire body throbs gently, as if to assure him he's alive.      On the playground, a woman watches her young son playing. The boy's game is incomprehensible. He runs between invisible landmarks, giggling madly, every so often returning to touch his mother, who reaches for him and pretends to be unable to take hold before he scurries once again into the plenum. The woman is pretty, but not beautiful. She has a long face, golden hair in loose curls. She wears a red sweater, though it is too warm for such an extravagance. Soon, he figures, she will remove it. He would like to see that. He would like to see all that he can. Laughter rings out, cleaves the quiet morning like a scythe.      At home, in his basement apartment, he has been working on a painting. The painting is drab, really. He is attempting to render what he likes to call his "internal landscape." And yet each effort yields the same results; the paintings are cold and dull, resembling frozen lakes of dark water closed in by reeds and twigs equally colorless. He thinks now of the latest painting in this series, the one he has abandoned for this excursion. He thinks of its bleak monochromatic scheme, and juxtaposes it against the glorious yellow light glowing beneath him. Is his heart really so chilled? He wishes to be a better man, nothing more than that.      The woman flips her hair back, revealing her smiling face. Her teeth are themselves precious artifacts and he finds himself wanting to possess them, in a jar perhaps, atop the mantle of his fireplace (which, he's been told, has not functioned in decades). She believes herself to be alone; this imagined privacy will remain with her, he realizes, and her memory of this day - if she keeps the memory at all - will not include his presence. Trees collapsing in forests, falling on deaf ears. He looks down, and sees that he has inadvertently crushed a black beetle beneath his boot. Its hindquarters twitch, the remainder of its body flattened beneath the rubber sole.      The boy on the playground, running his desultory patterns, reminds him of something, though he cannot say what. Even his own presence here, on this path cut into this hill, is familiar, although he's never come walking in this park before, at least not to his knowledge. But there have been other walks in other parks, and they are muddled and transposed, a palimpsest of images, each one suggesting another.      "Mommy!" the boy cries out, laughing.      "I see you!" she replies, simpering. "I see you!"      The boy looks back at her again, his bright blue pants, his white shirt, glowing, irradiated. And here in the chilled graphite of shadow, in the somatic wasteland of his own body, he sees it coming. The boy yaws off course, neck craned toward his mother. Watching them both, he is privy to the entire symphony of action and reaction: First, the look on this young mother's face, as she calculates, in synaptic light speed, the result of the given trajectory. She moves to rise, the yellow sunlight catching something on her wrist and held captive there, angry. By the time she is standing, the boy has already collided with the metal post of the swingset, his head turned back toward mother, so that the first point of contact is his right temple. There is a lupine welp, and the dull clang of bone on metal. The mother is up, but bodies move slower than brain chemistry prescribes, and ten yards can be a symphony space. The second impact is ineluctable. Her life is about to change.      "Tommy!" she shouts. Her voice is like something soft that has gone through a grater.      The boy falls backward, and his head hits first, on the concrete footing that anchors the swingset to the earth. There is a hollow thwuck, as if a vacuum-sealed jar has been opened.      "Tommy!" she screams again. "Tommy, are you okay?"      In the air, he smells pollen and oak, and the rich loam of springtime, of things resurrected, of life's absurd recalcitrance. He grinds the beetle beneath his boot. The woman below him unleashes a scream that is like nothing he has ever heard. It is guttural and rising in pitch, with something hot and dark at its center. It is a sound in many layers and colors, and it conjeals in the air around her. He tilts his head and the yellow morning trembles. She screams again; she is calling out for help. In his heart, something stirs. He takes a single tentative step toward her.      He was once a little boy, too. That's the strangest part. Time, evaporating behind him, so much fairy dust, and the future already on its haunches, ready to pounce. Lightning storms and teenagers with matches; speeding drunks on slick black roadways; angry men who covet; cells within the body making mistakes, dividing imperfectly, exuding black residue.      "Oh God!" the woman sobs. "Help us..."      But what help is available? He stands, examining her dancing, bewildered eyes. Hefting the boy, a limp sack held close, she moves first in one direction, then in another. She is remembering, he thinks. Where she left the car. Or which way to the hospital, which way to the road. She turns. She is looking right at him, now. He takes a deep breath, inhales the cool shade, thick as velvet. His heart flutters, an injured bird within a cage of bone.      But she does not see him. And her little boy is already dead.      He swallows and remains still. This is something, he realizes. Something for his painting. Quack