The meteor, a grapefruit-sized thing, landed on the patio of The Tavern on the Green. It sounded like a muffled explosion, like maybe kids had set off fireworks in the subway. I paused to listen further, but nothing came. After a few minutes, I heard the fire engines but assumed that it was nothing serious.

An hour later, I walked down Central Park West and saw firemen mulling around the tavern parking lot. They had blocked off sidewalks and roads. Everyone seemed to be waiting for someone or something to arrive.

The news the next morning reported that it had been a meteor, and that NASA had come to collect the remaining space debris. Space, apparently, had too much trash floating around and decided to drop a little bit on us.

That was the end of the story. The fire-damaged parts of the building were mended and repainted, and the restaurant began serving bad food again. The leaves and tender branches of a few trees had been singed, but everything else looked as it had.

But then a busboy became convinced that the park’s famous topiary animals had, as he put it, "come to life." No one believed him. The young actor lost his job but was perhaps consoled by the publicity he eventually gained.

In a few days, no one could deny that the busboy was right, in a sense. By some strange reaction to an extraterrestrial element, the plants had developed the ability to move. They could pull their roots from the ground and walk. Nearly all of the smaller plants in the immediate vicinity of the crash site had developed this mobility. The trees, experts surmised, were simply too large.

Spectators flocked to the park. NASA returned and set up a perimeter. They measured for radioactivity and deemed the area safe, but kept everyone a few yards away so scientists could observe and perform tests and whatnot. The topiaries didn’t know that they were sculpted into animals. They walked sideways and backward and changed directions indiscriminately.

The dinosaur and the elephant bumped into each other and got tangled beyond escape, becoming one monstrous beast with eight legs and two heads. But the noble horse was the media darling. News crews shot footage of it almost exclusively.

I didn’t care for that horse. I got a picture of myself with the gorilla in the background.