The Runner Summary and Analysis

The Runner Summary

The first of three stories in Part Two of this collection is "The Runner." A young, unnamed man is running laps around a pond in a city park in late afternoon. He sees normal sights, such as a man and his daughter feeding ducks from a footbridge, a pigeon strutting and two women strolling, and then he notices a car that surprisingly drives onto the park grass. It stops near a woman and child sitting on a blanket. The runner rounds a bend in the path and has his back to the scene when he hears the car depart, its engine backfiring. A middle-aged woman he recognizes from his apartment building approaches and asks him if he saw what happened. He says no, and she explains that a man got out of the car, took the...