Ernie sits on a park bench and watches her eat lunch. He’s been coming out to the park every day for three months to sit across from her quietly ever since the day he saw her after he was let go from his job as a copywriter for an Internet marketing firm.

“Don’t take it personally,” the manager told him. “The entire department is being let go.”

Ernie took it personally until he saw her sitting there, under a tree, alternately taking diminutive bites of her sandwich and flipping the pages of her book. He sat down across from her, took his phone out and pretended to check his email while watching her. She seemed so serene and oblivious to the chaos on the streets around her: Men having heated business conversations on their phones as they walked by, college students laughing and shoving each other and the man two benches down covered in pigeons.

Ernie returned the following day and she was there. He watched her from above the pages of the book he held. He returned the day after and the day after that. She was consistent and he admired that. Every day she sat at the same bench, crossed her ankles and removed the contents of her lunch bag: An egg salad and lettuce sandwich on whole wheat, wrapped in wax paper, a pink thermos filled with tea, three gingersnap cookies and a hardback book. Ernie liked to imagine that the books were about science – not science fiction like he enjoyed reading, but loftier topics such as calculating negative angles in astronomy or the fundamentals of celestial mechanics. He entertained the idea that this woman with long, white-blonde hair, delicate features and small hands had more going on beneath the surface than people credited her for, and he imagined her life: She was an amateur astronomer who lived alone in the East Village and could say “moon” in 10 different languages; she was fluent in Russian, French and Czech; and on weekends, she performed with an underground circus troupe as an aerialist and fire eater, sometimes combining both into one act. She also had a fantastic singing voice, despite the fire eating.

As Ernie watches her, noticing her pale-pink painted nails (she must have gotten a manicure over the weekend), a pigeon lands on his shoulder and he lets it sit there. He doesn’t want to move suddenly, break the serenity of their lunchtime ritual and call attention to himself. He desperately wants to talk to her, hear her voice as she says her name and feel her skin against his as they shake hands for the first time, but he doesn’t want to destroy his image of her with the truth, and he certainly doesn’t want to explain why he’s sitting on a park bench, dressed as a squirrel.

[Three Word Wednesday submission using the words break, negative and surface.]

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