by Lucas Wetzel

At Oppenstein Brothers Memorial Park, on 12th and Walnut Streets in Kansas City, no one picnics on Sundays. No one meets for late night trysts, and even if they did, there would be too much light to sneak around and barely enough green space to lay out a blanket. But during the workday, dozens of people visit the small landscaped space to eat lunch, look at their phones, or take smoke breaks at the little green fold-out tables. In the past few weeks a group of artists has used the park to conduct concerts and installations, from roving saxophonists to lunch-hour knitting circles. In spite of the recent creativity, the park is still characterized mostly by the mundane and the everyday. The following passages are an attempt to examine the park from the (mostly imagined) perspective of 12 people I’ve observed there in the past 12 months.

* * *

While walking back from lunch on Petticoat Lane, the Chairman of the Board feels an errant drop of water land on his cheek, giving him the sudden and unexpected sensation that he’s crying. As the drop — perhaps from an air conditioner, or a window washer — trickles down his face, he realizes he’s actually begun to weep, for the first time in 40 years. One after another, the faces of his family appear in his mind, looking at him silently. He can sense them there without needing to call up their names.

* * *

On a sunny April afternoon, she sits under the tree with her legs slung over the low stone wall, laughing with a colleague. It’s just a routine smoke break, but she looks like she’s on the front lawn of a college party, the type of setting where she picked up smoking in the first place. Up close she doesn’t look as young; her skin lined and delicate, her eyes pale and focused, her business suit turning her curves into angles. You’re both in professional attire now, playing the part of office workers until the role begins to stick. But who knows… You might have even met at a party once, way back in the twentieth century.

* * *

In the corner of the park, a man with a pencil mustache, earbuds and a black basketball jersey asks if you think this meteorite is worth anything. He holds out his hand to show you the artifact, small and black, an igneous rock covered with small vesicles that make it look like a petrified bubble bath. For all you know it could just be something spit out by the roadwork. “Do you collect these things?” you ask the guy, who shrugs and says with a slight lisp that he’s kind of a stargazer. He’s much more shy than his street-tough appearance would suggest, either a savant astronomer or 12th Street’s most charming charlatan. You tell him you’ll pass on the purchase but that he should definitely keep stargazing. When he smiles back at you he looks just like a little kid.

* * *

Her top-floor apartment is one of the few where it feels like you’re actually in a city. She likes to walk around in her underwear after a glass of wine, unshy and full of figure. The place is rent-controlled, so her boyfriend isn’t on the lease. No one knows what he does, but he’s got dozens of stories about the historically important punk shows of the nineties, when he went to art school on the coast. On New Year’s Eve they invite some friends over, fix cocktails, kick around a giant exercise ball, or sit high on the windowsills above the park, smoking cigarettes with the window cracked.

* * *

The restaurateur, bald and stocky, wears an apron, managing to smile even when he looks concerned. Like an at-large grandparent, he always asks his customers how everything is, refuses to let them clear their own tables, looks them in the eye and tells them that he hopes they’ll come back to see him soon. By that point they’ve forgiven the gristle in the schwarma and are thinking only of the warmth of the pita, the earthy texture of the hummus. Eating here is like visiting this man’s home and being served by his family. Who are you to decline such an invitation?

* * *

The girl with the railroad cap steps out of the hatchback, slams the door, and starts unloading the cargo area, stacking up blank canvases on the sidewalk beside the park. She tucks them under her arm and walks through the revolving doors of the office building where she keeps a studio on a mostly vacant floor. She started out painting self-portraits, dozens at a time, lifelike and realistic. But lately she’s been streaking the eyes and hair with purple, green and yellow-orange, painting faint halos until they look more like aliens or electrified beings. Pretty soon her face will be almost impossible to recognize. Pretty soon she will be someone else.

* * *

“Can you feel it?” the man shouts from across the street. “There’s a lot of electromagnetic energy building up right now.” He stops to grip a telephone pole with both arms, straining against it like he’s going to push it over, then letting go and nodding knowingly. “It’s all this digging,” he says, gesturing around to the road barriers and jackhammers one block over. “You can feel it in your lower back.” He’s dressed in a t-shirt and cargo pants and doesn’t look crazy except maybe in the eyes. It’s the kind of conversation that makes you question your grip on reality — plausible sounding at first but then not at all once you think about it. By that point he’s already moved on to warn one of the orange-clad streetcar workers that they’re messing with serious seismic forces, and the results just might be catastrophic.

* * *

After getting coffee and visiting his mother’s condo, he sits on a park bench and works on his project of building a free internet for people in poorer communities. It reminds him a little bit of Zuccotti Park, where he camped out for a month before they kicked everyone out and busted up his mesh network with baseball bats. But here there are no cameras, no police and seldom any protesters. People pretty much leave you alone.

* * *

“This is the most chill job I ever had,” the 19-year-old Community Improvement District intern says. He’s new on the job and has a fresh set of yellow-striped black pants, but no segue privileges as of yet. “You just walk around and talk to girls, maybe hand out bottled water on Ozone Impact Days. A lot of people look scared when we say hello, but we ain’t here to sell you nothin. We’re just doing our job, being friendly to people. We’re just doing what your tax money pay us to do.”

* * *

On the bench, dressed impeccably in white suit, bow tie and pince-nez, the architect sits in the shadows of his crowning achievement. He died 90 years ago today in his studio just down the street. Back then he drove his Model T at obnoxious speeds, or else sat on the floor of his studio, smoking monogrammed cigarettes, conjuring cosmic forces, designing buildings in his mind. Today his houses are all around us, restored or lying half in ruin, waiting to be discovered along with the neighborhoods in which they sit.

* * *

On the fourth floor of her office building, the woman runs on the treadmill, eyes level with the tops of the trees. She stares at the scraps of plastic trash bags caught in the branches, fluttering happily like little car-dealership flags. She looks down at the people walking their dogs, using the trash can or striding toward the parking garage. By the time she rounds mile 4, the sun is setting. Shadows creep down the buildings, pickpocketing the park of all remaining daylight. The reflective windows of an adjacent building make it look like the cars are driving right through each other. When she looks back up at the top of the trees, it feels almost like she’s floating.

* * *

At midnight the skateboarder dismounts and walks in circles around the anaphoric star disc. He winds up here every equinox and solstice, apparently confused as to how he arrived, scratching his head with one hand and gripping his longboard in the other. The paths of migratory birds are etched into the pavement in wide arcs, but at night they can be difficult to see.