The Squirrel Incident

A man rode by on a motorcycle smoking a cigarette. It’s not that he had not seen someone doing those two activities at once, it’s just that the fellow riding, seemed like a perfect gentleman, and the cigarette was somehow burning perfectly and ashing in just the right proportions. As if he were on a Vespa in the 50’s with a top hat on.
Anyway, he prided himself on noticing daily anomalies. Even when looking at a piece of art, he would find that one thing that was just a bit off or occurring in another dimension, or implied something just outside the narrative of the canvas.
This day, it was the cigarette rider. But there was also something else. There was a girl sitting on a park bench just across the street which the rider had passed.
She was sketching something on an art pad, and seemed in her own world entirely.
He immediately decided to go over and ask her what she was sketching.
He decided he wanted to tell her how sketching can save lives. That is to tell her his own story of being in Paris and seeing a man about to commit suicide and walking over to him with his own sketch pad and miraculously drawing a keyhole, a cross and a steeple and a door, and showing it to the man, who started immediately crying and came off the bridge. Turns out that man was a failed priest who felt he missed his calling and was going to force God to respond that evening. And those little sketches had convinced him that God was somehow still tuned into his life, so ti must not be over.
He was going to share all this with the girl on the bench. But before he could get over there, a huge truck came barreling by and hit a squirrel in the head. The squirrel was spinning in circles in the middle of the road, so he knew he had to do something. He jumped out in the middle of the road and started directing traffic. He called over to the girl to grab a trash bag from the park’s waste bins. Remarkably she kept sketching. But now it was clear she was sketching the spinning squirrel. She seemed incapable of leaving her sketch pad, or hearing the man’s commands.
Fortunately, an older man heard him, grabbed a trash bag and a large stick, and came over to bag the squirrel. He did so, and let the squirrel escape into the park trees, after some time of being dazed.
After all the drama passed, he walked over to the girl who was still sketching on the bench, and asked her. What exactly are you sketching now?
She turned around her pad and what he saw shocked him. It was a portrait of himself before the squirrel incident, while he was just sitting at the corner cafe.
She had been watching him, and as she put it, “Making sure you were ok.”
Then she turned the page, and there was a picture of him in what looked like a fireman’s suit, saving the spinning squirrel.
You’re a hero, she said. 
He responded, You know you can save lives by making art.
Yeah, but also by stopping traffic so a squirrel can get off the road.
He had always believed there were angels filming his life. Afterwards, as they both walked off, he wondered if she was one of his angels watching over, but also just watching his life.
Regardless, he had a dream that night that he was knight riding on a motorcycle smoking a long pipe.