A plank of wood, and on it, two people, and between them a distance of perhaps a hand's width.
Consider that. A hand's width. I have measured the gaps between things for longer than these people have had a word for measuring. From where I mostly am, the nearest something to any something else is four years of light, and that is a good day, a crowded day. Here, on this plank, warmth leaks off one body and lands on the other.
It arrives. That has never happened to me. Nothing I have ever held has been close enough to warm anything else.
And the smells, stacked three deep: cut grass, and bread going stale in a paper sack, and the particular musk of a person who has been walking. All at once. All reachable. A pigeon lands, so near it stirs the air against their ankles, and they do not even gasp.
Behind them the pond makes its small liquid noises; children shriek somewhere; a dog's heart is beating maybe thirty of their body-lengths off, which is to say, essentially inside the same breath they are breathing.
One of them, I notice, sits very still and looks at the water and seems to believe she is alone. Alone. Six inches from another heart. A hand's width from a warmth that is actively arriving on her skin. I run the arithmetic again, allowing for error, and I cannot make her solitary by any accounting I possess.
I would not correct her. She cannot see what I see: that she is packed to bursting with company, dense as a struck bell, sitting in the single most crowded cubic meter I have found in a very long survey.
A plank. Two hearts. The pigeon.
The jackpot.