Excerpt: Working title: All Around The Cherrytree

In the park, in the dark, a distressed young man was calling some strange things into the bushes.
"Panther!! Come on, Panther! Where are you? Panther!" He rustled the leaves a bit and tromped a bit down the path and called again. "PANTHER..." A middle aged woman in a tweed coat walking with a cane approached.
"Lose a kitty?" She asked in a sympathetic tone.
"PAN-THER!!! What? No. Panther is not a kitty." The young man replied. There was something in the way that he said it that did not sit well with the woman. She clutched her tweed more tightly around herself.
"ookay. I hope you find... panther."
"Me too. Ugh. Maybe he's by the tennis courts..." The young man said, then started off in a direction that may or may not have had anything to do with tennis courts. The woman in tweed (whose name was Mary) wondered wether Panther were perhaps the young man's imaginary friend. She shook her head and continued down the path, being wary of the bushes as she did so.
Suddenly, a tough looking young man clad in a threatening manner brandished a knife in Mary's face.
"Yo, old bitch! Give me your purse!"
"Oh!!! I don't have any money!!"
"Don't play with me, lady, come ON!" The thug stepped closer, towering over Mary aggressively. Mary's heart raced. She wondered what would happen if she screamed. Just then, another figure emerged from the brush. It spoke in a commanding bellow:
"UNHAND THAT WOMAN, YOU DISGUSTING WORM!"
"What the hell..?" The mugger turned to face an old man wearing a purple and black track suit. "Old man, don't you try nothing!"
"VILE SCUM, YOU DO NOT FRIGHTEN ME. DROP YOUR WEAPON! MERE KNIVES ARE USELESS AGAINST... THE PANTHER!" The Panther struck a quasi martial arts pose, his fingers curled like claws. Mary was terrified. She took up her cane and whipped it behind the punk's legs, hooking his thigh and pulling as hard as she could. Distracted as he had been by the appearance of The Panther, the hoodlum went down like a sack of something heavy. Mary scuttled several yards away from the fallen man, then looked back, concerned for the safety of the crazy old man. The Panther, however, was nowhere to be seen.
"Goodness, I do hope that young man finds him..." Mary said to herself, then headed home. She needed a drink.