Chin had a perfectly structured life. Each morning, at dawn, she would brew a cup of green tea, don her cream jumpsuit and headset. She would listen to the same AM radio news channel, and then begin walking, at the same pace, down the block, up the street, around the corner, and back again. About 1.8 miles. Sometimes Jake would run right past her, and she wouldn't even notice. Just moves straight ahead, eyes down, arms swinging, hand in fists, listening intently to the radio.

When she'd arrive home she'd work on the garden. Her backyard, walled in from the outside world by a high fence and tall, shaped pine trees every three meters, was perfectly square. A well-manicured path of stepping stones led from the sliding door to the yard's center, where one long rectangle of perfectly raked gravel was off to the right, and three large boulders of diminishing size lay to the left. The boulders were well-placed, and half buried, cleverly arranged to look perfectly natural and, somehow, placed there with purpose. One small pagoda was erected at the far end of the gravel strip, and a bonsai'd tree stood astride it. And in a far corner was a water feature: a large basin with a gently knocking shi-shi-odoshi -a handmade Japanese contraption with a freely swinging bamboo arm that would fill slowly with water on one end, fall under its weight, empty out and lift back up, while making a soothing knock onto a sounding rock with its other end when it fell back down. The basin would intentionally overflow with water, which would drip down the sides, watering the unique grasses at its base, fomenting a nice copper patina in the basin, and frosting it with a pretty green moss.

Creeping thyme grew delicately between the stepping stones, and pine needles fell from the trees. The pine needles needed to be swept, daily, or so she was instructed by her Zen therapist.

So she did, each day. And on Thursdays she would rake the gravel in perfect lines of a different direction, according to the whims of her internal compass This was supposed to be a "therapy". And it never worked. Because managing your anger in the face of all of life's wrongs takes more than a daily raking up of pine needles and pea gravel, or a quiet 11 minutes staring at three, well-placed rocks.

Her husband had left her abruptly two years ago. But she was left to manage the donut shop a few miles down the boulevard, and so was forced to find another home in the same neighborhood. And no one had ever seen the garden, which cost her a donut-load of money to have installed. The teenagers who worked the shop provided enough of a hassle for her to never miss having children. She kept so busy managing them, that she never noticed that she had no friends.

Until one afternoon when Mike1819 was staggering back from the AM/PM and was so drunk he he'd turned down the wrong street and just decided to keep going. Halfway down the block he felt the urge to empty his bladder, and looked both ways and ducked behind a bush next to a fence. Standing there, quietly relieving himself, he was startled by a knocking sound coming from the other side of the fence. Fearing he'd been spied, he zipped up and shut up for a minute, and then the "knock" happened again. He stood still, arresting himself, and tried to not sway with the always intrusive spinning of the world. And in that moment of stillness and small fear, he saw something extraordinary between the fence pickets, and it would change everything.

The most beautiful backyard he had ever lay eyes upon. A locale so serene that the distant resonating of the Music of the Spheres could be heard, and he was drawn in. He could not resist, but, no, there was nothing to resist at all. He was plainly drawn in, and out of the suburbs, for a moment, where time stopped.

The sight of an overweight drunk man in belt-less, oversized pants in the middle of the day was enough for anyone to call the police, but to see him coming over your back fence begged you to get a firearm out of the closet. Luckily, Chin missed the ignoble maneuver, as she was in the bathroom herself, and was getting ready to change into some work clothes.

But in her backyard, Mike1819 was dumbstruck in a moment of near religious proportions. He just stood there silently, gazing at the weave of lines in the pebble bed, and quietly taking it all in. He found himself taking one small step, and then stopping. And then another step. And soon a peacefulness settled over him, unlike anything he'd felt in ages. And standing there, emptying his heart into the water basin, he was reminded of something. A distant memory floated to the surface. Something he'd not thought of in twenty-six years. It was just beginning to take form in his head, and then his eyes welled up with tears, though he hardly noticed it...

Chin came at him with a large wooden Zen rake, screaming. It was a Karate-type yell that came from deep inside. The yell itself was birthed in her youth, by her father's instruction, but the passion behind it came from something more imminent, however detached. 

Mike1819 almost fell over and out of his pants, and would've pissed himself if he hadn't already taken care of that, but the rake was on its way. He grabbed his pants, she went for his head.

With a thwack he went down, like a sack of hams, and was totally stunned, as if he were in church and a SWAT team had suddenly stormed mass. She thwacked him repeatedly, and yelled something he couldn't understand. After a second or two of the beatings, he began to apologize and try and talk her down, but nothing seemed to work.

Mike1819 got to his feet, and stumbled back onto the Zen pebbles -which pained him to do so and only exacerbated the woman. He tried to walk off the rocks, like the padawan on rice paper, trying not to break it. He failed. The woman kept screaming, and it was unintelligible, but he had a moment of clarity and recognized the part of the fence where he had jumped over, and he went back for it. She got another thwack in, which didn't hurt him, but when he got to the other side of the fence, down on all fours beneath the pine trees and very near the puddle of urine he'd made only moments earlier, he was certain she'd be phoning the police, so he started running.

A few blocks into it, huffing and sweating like never before, he remembered where he was, and he took a turn and made his way home, not wanting any more trouble.

Chin did not call the police. She stopped. Found it in herself to be calm, having seen the fear in the man's face. Clearly he was not a threat. She told herself not to be angry. She told herself to look at the stones. She saw the pebbles. The broken lines. She told herself to rake them.

And then she went back to work at the donut shop, with the teenagers who drove her nuts.

Mike, meanwhile, sat on his torn couch, with the curtains drawn. For once, he didn't feel like having a beer. He wasn't sure what he felt, but he knew one thing for certain.

He just had to get back to that garden.