It's a blue summer afternoon with a moon set like a postage stamp on its corner of sky, but when the Man in the Windbreaker exits his home, he walks his duffel bag to his truck scowling, like he has not received the weather's peaceful message, like he always fails to get the message.

*

The Man in the Windbreaker drives north towards the water, sees the tide slurped out halfway across the straits. Where he lives a great river widens and gets brackish on the way to the bay but today it looks like nothing. From shore, the still-deep middle looks far off and silvery; the Man in the Windbreaker finds it hard to picture tanker ships passing through this puddled streamlet, and yet when the moon is rightly placed they do—metal-plated giants from Russia and Japan coast by taller than any visible cityscape. He arrives at the State Park's shore: exposed pylons drip algal green from burnt black wood; only the farthest out among them wearing even a skirt of muddied water. Gulls loop above the drained beach, eyeing for scraps. Bitterns and sandpipers pip and seek for food along the briny swell. The Man in the Windbreaker pulls his truck into the State Park lot, pulls it past the painted space, parks it crookedly across the grass. The birds seem not to mind his arrival. The birds don't flinch when he slams his door, and the stomping of his booted feet fails to startle them: in fact, for the thirty clangorous minutes the idling engine sounds, the calm birds continue to search the beach. So very many birds, so active and so hungry.

*

An old man and his yellow lab stand at the small curl of bay at the park's Southernmost point. Clayed delta mud slopes upward to the old man's torqued sneakers and to the tensed legs and mud-slopped paws of his crouching dog. The old man faces out towards the straits; the dog regards the man. The old man angles the ball-launching wand behind his shoulder, extends himself into a back-crinkling pose, and lets the fuzzy tennis ball rest in its holder, safe from the taunted dog. The Labrador regards the angled old man with a compliant but intensely focused face, expressing, as dogs will, that compliance is conditional, there will be barking if the ball isn't launched, and the chance to run the mud and retrieve flung items is denied the dog. So when the ball falls backward the same moment the old man falls, the dog has a dilemma about which to harry to first, ball or man, a dilemma made trickier by the ringing boom of an unfamiliar noise. The dog mouths the ball and squeaks this over the fallen fellow until he sees this alone won't rouse him. It drops the ball and reproves him with five sharp barks, then begins pawing at the man's stilled mound of chest. Another figure appears. Another man. Then the Labrador too falls. The man in the Windbreaker picks up the wand and rolls the dropped ball into the holder. He lobs it at a congregation of birds, but the birds barely stir. He smiles, turns from the beach, walks the wooded shortcut up into the heart of the park.

*

From her bench the precise timbre and location of the two booms eludes the schoolteacher. She looks up from her book to gaze across the Arles-like wash of sedges and marsh grasses; then she peers behind her towards the fencing, the oleanders, and the busy interstate that runs behind the park. The cars were keeping their usual frantic rhythm. An accident in the other lane? The airbase? Construction? Up the path comes a man in a Windbreaker and boots, and the woman wonders if he'll perhaps tell her what the noises were about. The Schoolteacher has a wide kind face that generates from people here greetings and little frissons of friendliness. The Man in the Windbreaker halts his jog to look at her, and instead of telling her what any noises were about, gives her the noise.

*

Splintery calisthenics structures appear every quarter mile or so along the path, with placards of instructive infographics: 1970s cartoonish renderings of pale descendants of Vitruvian men in jogging shorts working the equipment, and, seeing one, a jogger in blue jumpers leaves her path to stop beside the pull-up rings and mount them before her heart rate lowers. That heart rate means something to her, the sound of her nearing the body type she wants for herself, the one she tracks like an elusive spy through the woodlands and parks of the region, the one she'll capture in just such an everyday place as this, the one who will do obstacle courses in the Sierras and bloody any barroom sleazebag who tries her again. She does six reps and thinks the first shot a pulled muscle as it hits her. This won't do, she thinks, mistaking pain in her shock, hanging from the bar by one arm. Then she thinks nothing at all while three more shots aerate, rip, split lung, shoulder, skull. Elements of these parts dapple and splatter the Windbreaker as it moves north through the park, as if floating upon the man.

*

Paige hopes the cattails and California Thule obscure her to the vision of the advancing figure, hope the slicing blades of the pampas bushes halt his progress. Despite the late June date, grasses creep a weakened green along the path behind Paige, the faded shabby greenness California holds to itself like a child refusing to part with a favorite tattered blanket. Here she'd come to watch birds sun and wavelets ripple, to doodle notebooks with beasts and plants and shadows, to eat a crab apple from her rucksack—the little revivalist in her identified it as such—and sip homemade sunned tea, to listen to the tweeting of birds and tootling of barges, to dawdle and reflect until the veering of the earth seemed to gently halt. This cove has felt to her like her own private spot, a Friday afternoon favorite, run to after abandoning textbooks at home, but all the same she cannot account for who came here when she wasn't around. So she tumbles together all strewn possessions, hers and others, anything fresh, leaving only the most weathered bits of garbage, and rustles them into a thick bush that cuts her as she snugs her way under the gray scraping branches with her belly to the ground. She mats herself with dry leaves and silty dirt. She silences her phone after sending the necessary texts. For the duration of her waiting and his killing, she will think it constantly vibrating. Her trial of waiting goes on long past the incursion of the cops into the park, the killing of the man in the Windbreaker, the resolution of the situation; she moves an hour after that, stiffly and shaky, knowing too young how our most unpleasant hours become the purchasers of many years.

*

At dusk he'd put on his Windbreaker and, at the turn of poorly lit paths, trial things: grabbing a woman not anticipating a meet-cute on a fog-run, sucker-punching an old man, smashing out car windows. But in the morning, he liked the routine of exercise in the park, the northeast slope inland, the northwest slope out, the thing he could see himself learning to jog every day, if his patience sustained, if the medication didn't do what they distantly warned him it might. But they were all full of warnings that came to nothing. His doctor had actively discouraged his jogging. The doctor alerted the man to his weight by explaining to him how the weight had won: too much weight to bounce safely on knees, shins, and all the little underprepared bones. Bicycling, monitored gym work, hikes, then—years from now, given the anticipated outcomes—maybe some jogging. At the time, he lacked the nerve to tell the doctor, "Fuck that." He'd only gotten fat after hearing for a decade that he couldn't heal; this second hip surgery had been presented to him as almost too experimental to consent to, but he signed away. Now 46, he tracked huffily through his preferred paths, and it cheered him to reflect that his urge for self-maintenance and improvement was rooted equally in feelings of non-compliance, in sticking it to Dr. Whozit and all the naysayers, taking a few anti-anxiety pills, thank you, and the usual pain meds, and feeling a master of the park, scoping it daily: the jogging path and the bike path that ran parallel to each other with only a plush berm of grass dividing them; the paths angled inland at such a gentle curve that joggers and walkers will daydreamily forget themselves and veer over to the bike lane; this cues the ringing of bike bells, calls of "on your left," occasional shrieks of "Move," even if the lanes mostly displayed spectacles of comity and sustained human improvement; the people on the path were too focused to be alert. So he ran and ran and if he were considered as a beast or a machine the running can be said to have bettered him, but as a man the running did not: some days before the shooting, he jumps over the grassy perm to elbow the head of a bicyclist, and marvels at his own speed as he runs a bee-line through the wood path, listening to the felled bicyclist groan.

*

It is a recent installation: the walled bicyclist and pedestrian bridge that bordered the freeway onramp, bringing the State Park to the shopping center and to the beginning of the suburban hills where many Estancians lived, making the town a village welcoming to bicycles and feet. Over the bridge, a young Quizno's employee rides from the shopping center and enters the park with three fingers over the handlebars; his bike tilts oafishly as he chugs his mocha. It's a hot day for a mocha but working next a Starbuck's the little change he makes in tips rarely converts into anything else. It's also an exceedingly hot day to wear a Windbreaker, to clomp up the path in Carhartt pants and thick black boots, so when the sandwich-maker sees all this he wonders who this Windbreaker guy is fooling. The young man's eyes widen for friendly contact, as they had all day over the sandwich counter, as they do whenever encountering another human. But a connection fails. The Windbreaker parts and black steel shows, its tubular sleeking menace fills the stranger's gloved hand. Unable to change course, the young man of Quizno's hefts the uncapped mocha towards the face of this man, frothing his chin with a little brown beard. A curious last act before dying—to toss away such a beloved daily thing.

__

I wrote this in response to a prompt by the wonderful writer Wendell Mayo where my fellow grad students and I were to choose from a list of postmodern techniques. I chose "spatial story" and without looking up what that meant decided to write a story that moves narratively from south to north. I set it in my hometown State Park because it was cold and gray in Ohio and I wanted to luxuriate in painterly California memories. It's a very nostalgic story; my dad and the family dog appear on page one. 

Regarding the mass shooter, I place the Man in the Windbreaker somewhere at the intersections of gun culture, the culture of weaponized self-improvement hucked by Jordan Peterson and aggro quarters of the Fitness Industry, and the snarling territorial regard the worst suburbanites have towards public spaces they perceive as theirs.