This passage could easily belong to a piece of nonfiction--to one of the witty old Letters from Europe that used to run in The New Yorker . And in fact, in the best of these character studies, a vivid picture of Cold War Europe--infected with mediocre rhetoric, imprisoned by fake boundaries, inhabited by numb and ambivalent people--begins to take shape.
This passage could easily belong to a piece of nonfiction.
This passage is certainly a work of fiction.
A toddler is sitting on a swing
This was opened in 1990 to much opposition.
I know exactly what is happening.
A little boy splashes in the water by himself
He did not bother to uphold the theory of death by natural causes.
It requires an ongoing effort to be effective.