The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips Page A

ball. A skinny woman whose black pit bull strained against its leash. The frightening old men who dared fish in the city pond. All staring at her, or so it seemed, with brazen judgment, as though they knew she was not where she was supposed to be. As though someone had instructed them to keep an eye on her.
    Because the Database had abused her eyes, the swans looked to her like big white irascible blurs. A baby sitting on the grass in a red coat was actually a fire hydrant; a spaniel’s face was actually a spaniel’s behind.
    She feared the pit bull chasing its squeaky toy that shrieked like a human when trapped between canine jaws.
    A group of schoolchildren swarmed the paved path; their exhausted teacher pointed them toward the exit. “But we didn’t even get the chance to get lost!” a girl protested.
    Josephine fled the paved path for a dirt trail leading toward the innards of the park. She passed trees tagged with graffiti. Discarded soda cans, used condoms, dirty napkins, ragged spiderwebs, squirrels more anxious than usual.
    She almost stepped on a matted mash of twigs and feathers twisted at bizarre angles, an appalling object, difficult to look at. Only a sicko would gape, attempt to sort it out, weigh in on one side or the other—a fallen nest or the aftermath of a death?
    She came to yellow police tape boxing in the area between three trees, but the space was empty. No blood, no sign of anything.
    She hadn’t even brought her phone.
    She stood eyeing the police tape until a father carrying his young daughter on his shoulders strolled past. “I can’t even tell what you’re pointing at,” he was saying to her, almost scornfully. “Are you pointing at the trees? What, you want us to go and live in these woods and be savages?”
    Josephine hurried away from the police tape, emerged out of the woods onto a lawn covered in grazing geese. The geese began to stride in her direction, hissing.
    She escaped onto a path lined with cattails.
    Scat tit.
    At ails.
    A row of dead cats all hung up by their tails.
    A man and woman in business attire passed in front of her, talking loudly and walking quickly. The man was saying, “and we’ll live by a lake. We’ll have a boat. A rowboat.” The woman looked tired. There was a stain on her cream-colored blouse. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she kept saying, maybe sarcastically.
    And then, on the way out of the park, a mouse in the middle of the road, practically two-dimensional now, its mouth frozen open in a scream.
    *   *   *
    She wouldn’t let the geese win. She would be brave; she would go to the grocery store like a normal person. She would buy food. She would cook food. She would talk to him. Tell him everything. They would make a plan. As they always had.
    She walked and walked and eventually came to a grocery store with a filthy yet friendly yellow awning and a tower of pomegranates out front. She didn’t know whether pomegranates should be selected based on firmness or fragrance or hue.
    Poor me granite.
    Pagan remote.
    Page tame no.
    She grabbed three at random, and a few vegetables, a box of spaghetti, a chunk of Parmesan. The cashier’s collar was crooked, the left side jutting upward. Filled with pity, Josephine averted her eyes.
    Back at the sublet by the highway entrance ramp, a number of the plants seemed to be dying. There was a text from her mother: All okay in big bad city? The bed was unmade and the laundry ungathered. Enigmatic odors arose from the trash can. In the kitchen, mice had already replaced the piles of turds Joseph wiped away this morning. She found it impossible to be fastidious nowadays. She filled a glass and watered a few of the limpest plants. Had they been given any watering instructions? Had Joseph said something about that when she wasn’t listening? She felt guilty.
    But she felt bold too, as she sliced the garlic, as she turned on the gas, warmed the kitchen, that soothing smell of boiling pasta. She laid it out, this