The walkway surrounding the Asphalt Park is cobblestone, and six hundred and forty of them have lain together for one hundred years, noting the changing fashions of the neighborhood and it’s citizens. The cobblestone walk remembers when the park was a weedy lot, slated to be built upon on several occasions. But the reasons that each plan was abandoned are varied and forgotten for the consensus amongst cobblestones is that when the neighboring lot was paved over in asphalt, surrounded with a spiked fence, and official unveiled as a park, they had found their calling in the cosmos, to serve the Asphalt Park and it’s denizens.
The memories of the cobblestones are a library of triumph, tragedy, and sublime horrors such that one could expect of 640 witnesses to a century of city life. This journey through time has solidified the consciousness of the cobblestones so that, to all, they are not single cut blocks of granite arranged together, but are cells of an organism. Just as the skin is the largest organism in the human body, the cobblestone walk is a six hundred and forty cell epidermis surrounding the Asphalt Park.
Epi Tontillo, brown of skin and a displaced member of a far off community, forever altered this arrangement.
Such is the case when humanity blindly affects the course of other organisms while we’re immersed in resident folly. It was a minor impediment to an unimportant venture that led Epi to displace one of the six hundred and forty cobblestones surrounding the Asphalt Park.
On his way home from a days work at a city delicatessen, Epi needed to stop by the pizzeria for a pie to bring home to his wife, waiting in their apartment around the corner, six blocks from the Asphalt Park. Because he worked an early shift, Epi got back to the neighborhood earlier than the other daytime workers around the park. He got a parking space near the pizzeria and fatefully adjacent to the cobblestones.
Despite the cobblestones’ century of accumulated wisdom, their low perspective and only passing intimacy with the neighborhood people who walked by don’t allow the stones to have knowledge of peoples’ home lives and the particular importance of television programs. Yet for Epi, it was because of his devotion to the nightly line-up that he and his wife so enjoyed sharing that he acted hastily and recklessly to escape the predicament he found himself in.
Perhaps the combination of excitement in finding a parking spot and pressure to get home quickly threw off Epi’s usual routine of taking his car keys with him after shutting off the ignition, opening the door, and hitting the power locks. But on the evening of the cobblestone’s displacement, Epi’s keys were locked in his car.
His pizza was quickly cooling. He hadn’t the money or time for a locksmith. His English wasn’t sufficient to ask for help. Although his wife would call him stupid, this was his car. He paid for. He wanted to be home, and the window he would replace.
It’s remembered warmly, even celebrated in light of the tragedy amongst the cobblestones that after one of it’s own, a cell in the structure, was kicked first in anger, then again with vigor, loosened, and thrown at a car window it bounced off three times, defiant to leave the Asphalt Park.
On the fourth throw, one of the six hundred and forty cobblestones that surround the asphalt park became the first to burst into a car, be driven six blocks, cursed at, and discarded on the dense and altogether dull curb outside of Epi Tontillo’s apartment.