at the playground

The scene was just right for tragedy. On the park bench I watched them play in bright cartoon shirts, sticky with spilled juice and the sweat of healthy children. Who would it be, the little black boy playing with his Hotwheels unattended? He was inches from the road, utterly absorbed in driving his toy cars off rock cliffs to their destruction. Or maybe the girl on the monkey bars, with hair the color of corn silk, her slender arms swinging from pole to pole as behind a tree, a pedophile watched and dreamed.

Cast out by his older brothers, a dirty-faced toddler ate pine chips from the ground by the swing set as elder siblings dared each other to jump. The chains rattled and glinted in the sun as the flimsy set shook with their daredevil stunts.

And then…

There it was. I'd been waiting for this all day but still it made my stomach knot and churn as blood was diverted away from my digestive system to feed the neurotic spasms of my heart. I tried to count by prime numbers to calm myself then realized the futility. Either I was going to die or some hapless child would be sacrificed in my place.

Through the trees, darkly, a teenage boy in a black trenchcoat emerged, like some spiked and studded angel of death. Something silver glinted in his hand, and his path too-casually took him close behind the toddler in the dirt.

Quickly, I began tracing the wood grain of the bench with my finger. If I could find the point of origin by the time trenchcoat boy walked past, maybe it would only be a cell phone or a crushed candy wrapper in his hand.

But the swirls of wood were hopelessly entangled. I closed my eyes and resigned myself to the inevitable. In my mind I saw the flick of a straight razor in his hand, and his shadow falling over the toddler, who would look up without fear, exposing his throat without a second thought because civilization is slowly destroying our most basic instincts. Then a warm gush of arterial spray splattering the wood chips below…

In the outside world, a child screamed. Despite my intentions not to watch the death of this sacrificial lamb I opened my eyes. But the child was still eating wood chips. One of his older siblings had fallen from the swings and skinned his knee. His howls reached a higher pitch as his friends tried to clean the wound with some kind of bright red soft drink in a plastic bottle. The teenage boy had already stalked past, oblivious, and I could see it was a sleek cellular phone he held in his hand.

Back in my room I locked the doors- check them twice or pay the price, and rolled down the shades with trembling hands. There was no triumph in this day, only an impending doom. Really, how much longer can we all keep cheating fate.