Alex wasn’t the biggest fan of city parks – they were always a little too crowded with city folk who wanted an escape from the concrete jungle that was slowly suffocating them. Like many who lived in a metropolis, the tigress complained about the people who lived there with her and used “city folk” like it was a slur as if she wasn’t a city gal born and raised. You’re not a city native unless you complain about living in the city on the daily, yet do nothing about it; like leave.

Tashi Gibson, the tigress’s boyfriend, on the other hand, enjoyed the city’s “Green Lungs” as he called them, since they reminded him of the suburbs where he grew up. A picnic in the park on a nice spring afternoon was his idea of the best thing to do in the city, while Alex’s idea of the best thing to do in the city was probably something work-related or IKEA. The tigress was a workaholic, despite claiming not to be, she had about 99% of the signs of one; she worked late nights, functioned on little to no sleep, and put in too much effort into something that wasn’t paying any dividends. Not yet at least.

Her waitressing job wasn’t what was keeping her up at night, at least when she wasn’t working nights. Instead, it was her side project of writing songs and recording demos in her little makeshift bedroom studio. “Studio” was a bit of a generous description; all she had with her was a yellowed white MacBook that was falling apart at the seams, a shoddy USB microphone from AliExpress that was sending her recordings directly to the Chinese Communist Party, and a copy of GarageBand that thankfully came with her laptop. She used pillows to cover the doors and windows for some semblance of soundproofing and hung her microphone up by a string from her powered-off ceiling fan so that she could sing standing up. It wasn’t fancy, and Tashi often offered to take her to the store to get a proper microphone stand, but Alex had her process. And if it worked for free ninety-nine, why spend an extra twenty dollars on a mic stand? That was the billionaire mindset, right there.

“You know I don’t like city parks, Tashi,” Alex said with a grumble as she pushed her blue light-cutting glasses up her snout and moved her gaze away from the horse and to the screen on her laptop. The bezels on it were thick and the screen was a little small for how big the laptop was, but all laptops were like that back in 2008, when it was the shiny new thing from the trillion-dollar fruit cult. Tashi cringed every time he saw that laptop and was surprised every single day that it was still functioning. He couldn’t count how many times he considered taking a quick trip down to the Apple store to get Alex a brand-new one just so she would get rid of that wretched relic that haunted his tech-nerd dreams with its yellowed plastic, missing screws, and missing rubber feet that made the laptop wobble whenever the tigress typed even on the smoothest of surfaces. But he knew that despite the computer being obsolete and ugly to look at, it meant a lot to Alex, and she would upgrade to a new one when she was ready – which was probably going to be when it stopped turning on. It was a good thing that Tashi forced her to set up automatic backups to their home data server, he’d hate to see how crushed she would be if the laptop stopped working when she still had important stuff that she had been working on, on it.

Tashi leaned against the doorway to Alex’s bedroom in her apartment, which was currently in studio mode with a mess of papers with her lyric drafts and musical notes scattered all over the floor. Tashi wasn’t a fan of mess and he knew that the tigress wasn’t either – he was a little surprised to see how well she was thriving in her little bubble of controlled chaos.

It was barely noon but the tigress had already been huddled up in her makeshift studio for over five hours. It was time for her to take a break, whether she wanted to or not. “You’ve never even been to this park, Alex. How will you know if it is good or bad if you haven’t been there!” Tashi chirped happily as he pushed himself from the doorway and took steps toward his girlfriend. Tashi was a tall horse, muscular, too. He was built like a tank and was the kind of tall that would make living in countries like Japan difficult. Alex had to tilt her head to maintain any semblance of eye contact with him whenever they were in a hug – and kissing? She had to tip-toe to do that. His muscular race-horse figure wasn’t all fun and games, however; as he often had to be extra cautious where he stepped to prevent himself from putting his full weight onto something precious and crushing it.

The horse did his best to maneuver around the tigress’s pile of lyrics, but with over 60% of the floor covered in thinly sliced tree carcasses, he was bound to step on a few. He made an effort not to put his full weight down on each of his steps just to avoid leaving an imprint of his hoof in the precious pieces of paper that the tigress somehow was able to reorganize back into neat folders every time, once her daily recording sessions were done. The horse ended up crumpling a few pieces of paper very slightly but he made it all the way to the tigress’s bed and placed a hand on her shoulder as she continued clicking and dragging her finger around on her laptop’s trackpad to layer her tracks. Once his hand was on her shoulder, he gave it a squeeze and the tiger turned her attention away from her laptop to look at him. Her slightly tired eyebrows were raised up as high as they could go and her glasses clung to the very end of her nose as they had slipped down her muzzle again.

“You know I don’t like city parks,” the tigress repeated her line like an NPC (non-playable character) from a Bethesda game. She didn’t even realize that she repeated exactly what she had said just a few seconds earlier word-for-word.

The tall Clydesdale horse, however, did notice and gave his girlfriend’s shoulder another squeeze, this time much firmer than the last. He then pressed his snout into the top of the tigress’s head, reached his free hand to grab Alex’s laptop by its screen, and pulled it away from her.

“Alright, little miss pop star. That’s definitely enough extra work for you today.” The horse’s tone and cadence were parental, like a mother who was concerned that her child was spending too much time killing hookers in Grand Theft Auto.

“Noooooo!” Alex whined like a spoiled child when her laptop was snatched away from her, and because she had been working on this little side project for so long, she didn’t have the strength to play tug of war with the horse for her computer. The old, peeling, seafoam green Audio-Technica M50Xs that sat on her head wasn’t enough to keep the laptop from being taken away from her either, as the headphone jack on the yellowed laptop had long lost its virgin tightness from years of constant plugging and unplugging. Her headphones slipped from her head to her shoulders and she frowned as she watched the horse take her laptop away and place it on her dresser on the opposite side of the room.

While the horse had his back turned to the tigress, Alex jumped off of her bed and made a run for the dresser. Determined to grab her laptop, dash, and get back to working on her demo, the tigress moved as fast as she could across her bedroom. She made it about two-thirds of the way before she stepped on a small strawberry plush that she was using as a paperweight for a stack of lyrics and music notes that she had placed on the floor. The plush rolled under the tigress’s soft pink beans and sent her leg lunging forward, causing her to fall down to the floor.

“Hyyuhhh!”

The tiger kicked a stack of paper into the air as she slipped and fell onto her back with a very loud and noticeable crash.

‘Thwump.’

“Ow…”

The sound of paper falling through the air all over the bedroom reminded the horse of those videos of high schoolers tossing their papers up in the air at the end of the school year. He always felt bad for the janitors whenever he saw those videos. Sure, it made for great theatrics and looked good on video, but the poor janitors had to clean it all up once all the students had left. The whole concept of tossing papers into the air as a form of celebration never really sat well with him. As papers confetti-ed around him, he turned around to see his girlfriend on her back, on the floor, with her arms and legs spread out into the starfish position. He walked over to the tigress, raised his left eyebrow, and smirked at her.

“C’mon, a little walk in the park isn’t going to hurt. It looks like you need some practice walking anyway.” The Clydesdale crouched down into a squat with his hooves flat on the floor and chuckled. He offered his big hand to the tigress as she stared at the ceiling with a blank and defeated look on her face. As a cat, Alex prided herself in her nimbleness and agility, and what she displayed right meow was the agility and nimbleness of an overexcited golden retriever. She felt embarrassed, ashamed, and most importantly, a little bit angry that Tashi was right. Like most people, the tigress did not enjoy being wrong – her many years of arguing with her family and using “I’ll look it up!” as part of her defense arsenal was evidence of it. And whenever the tigress had the confidence that Google was on her side, she was never, ever, ever wrong.

Google couldn’t help argue in her favor this time. She really did need a break, pronto.

“Okay,” was all the tigress said when she shifted her gaze from the ceiling fan and her rinky-dink microphone that hung from it to the horse’s sweet smiling snoot. When she saw how soft and endearing his smile was, she couldn’t help but smile, too. She was still upset about not being able to continue working on her music, but the way that herbivore coder-whizz smiled with his thick apple-grabbing lips always had a way of making her just a little less mad.

---

City parks were a little bit weird, even to a born-and-raised city girl like Alex. They were often named after people who either did something great or who donated a lot of money to the city to hide the not-so-great things that they were doing. To Tashi, they were a marvel; little green lungs scattered around a concrete jungle. The air in a city park was fresher and cleaner, and as a horse, there were very few things better than the smell of green. His nostrils flared as he took in the unmistakable smell of freshly cut grass and morning rain drying in the afternoon sun as he and Alex walked along a path in the city’s grandest park.

“I can’t believe the park’s name is actually just ‘city park’,” Tashi said with a chuckle as he and Alex strolled along the concrete path that cut through the middle of the park. The park, lazily named, was situated a little outside of the metro area of the city but was still technically part of the province that shared the same name. Alex thought that a 15-minute drive to go to some park was ridiculous, but as she and her horse boyfriend walked through the endless green, without a tall evil corporation’s building in sight, it felt pretty nice.

“They ran out of good people to name it after. Would you prefer they venture off into bad people from history? I don’t think people would want to come to Hitler Park.” Alex chuckled and leaned her head against the horse’s side as they continued on their hand-in-hand walk through the greenery.

It was springtime, so the weather wasn’t warm per se – it was warm enough for Tashi to wear a simple green t-shirt and cargo shorts but still cool enough for Alex to wear her favorite red sweater with her daisy duke jean shorts and not raise any eyebrows. The pollen that came with the season wasn’t ideal, especially for a horse with large nostrils like Tashi. With almost every breath he took in, little bits of tree spunk flew into his nose, got caught in his nose hairs, and caused him to sneeze.

Alex and her boyfriend walked through the entire park three times, taking small shortcuts and divergences on each lap to explore different areas of the park. There was a giant lake in the center of the park with swan and duck-shaped paddle boats, a large opening with lemon trees with signs instructing visitors not to pick the fruits (which no one ever listened to) in the southern part, and a large hedge maze in the northern part of the park that was just a little bit overgrown. Alex refused to go into the maze, but when Tashi ventured in on his own, the tigress was afraid that he would get stuck in there forever, and after about a minute of waiting for him to reappear from the Stephen King-esque maze, she ran in after him.

---

The maze took a lot out of the pair; it was vast, confusing, and complex. It sent the tigress and the horse running around in circles trying to find the way out and also resulted in a heated argument between the two. If only they had checked the name of the maze under the overgrowth on its sign; Quarrel Quarry.

It sure did live up to its name.

Alex and Tashi approached a bench that was along one of the side paths in the park. They were tired and sweaty – spotting that bench was like discovering El Dorado. They dragged their feet in silence with about a foot of distance in between them. Their argument in the maze was so heated that they were giving each other the silent treatment.

“I think it’s this way, Alex,” Tashi said with a hopeful tone in his voice as he made a left turn at one of the many intersections of the maze.

“No, Tashi, it is NOT! That’s the same way we just went and we’ve ended back here for like the third time already.” Alex groaned and stopped in her tracks to point in the opposite direction to where the horse was headed. Tashi’s ears flickered at the sound of his girlfriend’s familiar snarl that she added to the end of sentences whenever she was agitated and turned around to look at her.

Alex had her arms crossed over her chest and her tail flickered back and forth behind her. The tigress had every reason to be upset, they had been in the maze for over an hour now, and it looked like they would remain there for much longer if they listened to Tashi's instincts, which, with no offense at all, Alex thought were incredibly wrong. “Prey instincts” she called them.

“Eh? What do you mean? We’re not going in circles. This is a completely different intersection.” Tashi furrowed his brow, made his way over to the tigress, and took both of her hands in his. “C’mon, I know the way out is this way, I can feel it.”

“But we’ve been in here for hours!!! Circling the same way over and over again Tashi!” Alex started to raise her voice out of anger, which made the horse’s ears flatten against his head. He still held onto Alex’s hands.

“C’mon, my little tiger. Calm down. It’s just a maze, we can get out of it.” The Clydesdale continued to smile at her, even as she got increasingly pissy toward him. Once he said it, he realized that maybe telling her to calm down was a bit condescending. He was just about to apologize for it, but by the time he parted his lips to say it to her, the tigress was already shouting at him and a screaming match between them had begun. The shouting from both sides was so loud that the birds that had been watching and mocking them as they got lost in the hedge maze scattered and flew away in all directions above them. Eventually, after about five minutes of arguing, Alex shook the horse’s hands off of hers and stormed off in the direction that she thought the exit of the maze would be.

Tashi stood there and watched as the tigress turned the corner and disappeared behind the tall hedge walls. He could still feel the warmth of her hands in his, but when he curled his fingers into his palm, he realized her hands weren’t there anymore. With a little frown, he turned to look in the direction that he thought was the correct way and took a deep breath through his nose. He closed his eyes momentarily as he exhaled and turned around to walk in the direction that Alex had gone in, with his head hung low.