Sunrise 5AM
In the expanse of an open field, a u-seat swing creaks, sweeping back and forth.
The marsh of spongy woodchips blankets a rectangle, cedar carpet with plywood parameters. Area: 1500 square feet. 12 and ½ feet high at the top of the tallest slide.
Still air in a vacuum of subdued dawn. I am confined like a cricket in a glass box, chirping in Cantonese. Brisk March like February gusts like January chills.
If I lick the monkey bar pole, will my tongue stick?
I tried it once in the backyard of her duplex during the first snow of late November. She was baking chicken cordon blue for my mom and me. I wanted to know if it would stick the way lizards suction flies to their tongues.
I am no match for metal’s thermal conductivity.
She poured hot water down the metal fence post and lifted my head away. We never told my mom.
Panning the spongy ground, I estimate the force of impact of jumping from the slide’s high point.
Free-fall.
I wonder what words fell from her lips when they told her she was going to die. Did she recite a holy verse under her breathe or stare silent
minus a few rustles that echo up from behind bushes. They are far from where I swing, watching a hawk soar above the highest etchings of the dawn’s silhouette.
* * *
Mid-Morning 10AM
The sky is grey like cooled coals. Everything hums as if vibrating off metal.
Female jogger. Pink spandex. Sprints quick.
Slows down rounding the foreground where the field meets the park.
Then halts.
Stretching obliques and quads.
Arm cross. Toe touch. Up dog. 10 seconds each. Rinse. Repeat.
Everyone spins their own tales in this world. Some are just better story tellers.
She used to say, as she read to me from a book of fables from the 1960s. A life-sized hare dozing in the corner of the room, a tortoise wobbling his shelled body toward a regulation finish line.
I hear panting beneath the swing set.
Rusty, sit boy!
Stay!
Get down!
Before turning out the light, we’d kneel at my bedside and pray the Our Father.
I don’t remember how it ends.
I feel nips at my feet when my swing arches low to dachshund height. I bend down to pat his chubby belly.
His handlers run towards me. Twin boys in matching striped shirts. Like a Saturday morning cartoon duo.
The one in blue stripes scales to the top of the slide’s plastic covering. He sits cross-legged. The Spiderman of Fairview Park.
The other in red, with quiet confidence, pulls out an invisible pistol and fires off towards his brother.
Flawless precision.
I watch Blue Boy jump to the woodchips below,
Pirouetting past bullets that pepper the air, and
descending like an elegant arachnid
from silk threads of web,
undulating in ecstasy to the smooth pulse
of matter particles in
time and space he
cradles in his hand,
and hits the ground.
He jumps to his feet. I call for their attention but feel I’m interrupting the love song of two erhus in duet.
Her TV came in fuzzy on station 64.
Why aren’t you guys at school?
Something about the antenna, I think.
Our mom teaches us.
The channel with Scooby-Doo was pretty clear.
What do you learn?
We didn’t watch it much anyway.
The Word of God.
Though she did like The Price is Right.
And what does He say?
Hated Wheel of Fortune.
Stay away from non-believers.
Blue Boy, now a cop, chases Red Boy robber around the play-set in a careful game of cat and mouse. Meticulous,
they run around in circles like some geometric stencil set, a trail of color hung behind them as they dart from ground to bridge to bar. The air, a woven tessellation.
Chase. Shoot. Shoot. Chase.
The jogger darts through the field, limbs moving like gears shifting through a mechanical crank. She seems to slog eastward through the muddy low-tide of a shoreline.
* * *
Post-lunch 2PM
In the park, the old men come and go, talking of Joe DiMaggio.1
And lawn care.
An elderly couple on a bench near the teeter-totter, unwraps lunch, a dollar menu fish sandwich, and chew it like cud as the buns turn gummy and stick to their dentures.
They watch children their plaid uniforms as St. Angela’s lets out down the street.
“To children heaven is being an adult. To an adult, heaven is being children again.”2
Little kids in little clothes with kid sneakers trickle into the playpen of bastardized gym equipment dyed Play Dough fuchsia.
Looking radioactive. Toxic.
The couple sits idle, the kids swing, bar to bar, chattering and singing to themselves in the heat of midday.
In Fujian, they don’t wish you happy birthday. It implies you won’t live to see your next one.
She was born May 12th /13th at midnight. Maybe she was born twice.
We celebrated at a picnic table in the backyard. She loved angel food cake with the little specs of color inside.
A girl with mismatched socks plays house alone near a moveable tic-tac-toe board. She sets the make-believe dinner table out on the ground and puts an imaginary baby to bed in his basinet.
Spoon. Fork. Plate. Knife. Cup.
Sock girl folds bath towels in the living room as the baby sleeps. She gets halfway through her basket when
Thwack. A boy whips a whiffle ball at her arm.
She drops her iron, the baby wakes, wailing.
He teases her about her socks.
Her house sags and droops until it stands no longer,
and I see her dirty legs poke out from under the debris.
My legs tire from pumping the swing.
The elderly couple slinks down the path toward the neighborhood. Let the Luck of the Lord be with you.
It would’ve been Friday, May 13th. She chose to celebrate the 12th.
After licking her plate clean of angel food, she dozed off in her bed for an afternoon nap. I read a book about a girl detective in the hallway near her room. Her snores slipped out from under the door, in calming cadence with each word I read.
Sock girl lies on her stomach on the u-swing, upper body drooped over the seat, suspended through torso muscles. Her tennis shoes light up when she moves her feet.
Kicking the air to propel the swing,
they flash a scarlet red,
glistening little speckles.
She etches a plan to build a castle
upon the ruins of her house.
The foundation
is already sturdy.
With an architect’s compass,
she sketches blueprints in her mind.
Today’s forecast: 60% cloud coverage.
Tomorrow: 80% chance of rain.
* * *
Evening 8PM
The sun is a dim paper lantern dipping towards the west.
My back feels frozen, as if encased in ice, while I lay upon the elderly couple’s bench.
Teenagers line the wobbly bridge with lit cigarettes while their younger siblings set action figures on fire at home. Laughing, cursing, flicking ash to the ground. Burning tar looks like a thousand paper cranes carrying candles across a slate river.
The gaggle whoops tribal chants and racial slurs back and forth to one another in some mating call. Natural instincts. Pure and human.
Altruism is the most selfish trait when fueled by the quest for honor.
I remember the way her hair looked when she dyed it a reddish brown the night before Easter mass. In the communion line, it glowed in Pentecostal light.
A small resurrection of youth.
They hung him on a cross for me.3
After the service, she grabbed a basket and helped me collect eggs from the church lawn, decorated in pastels with little polka-dot designs.
A crucifix hung above the doorway in her bedroom. When I read outside her door, I wondered if it guarded us both equally.
Jesus died for somebody’s sins
But not mine.4
A boy and girl walk away, hand in hand, cigarettes ablaze, their smoke dying the dusk deep grey and eclipsing the sun until it is extinguished.
* * *
Nightfall 11PM
Still again.
All is a stagnant mold crystallized in black sap and molasses.
The swing where sock girl sat hovers motionless, its black seat petrified between two chains like a floating Valley of Shadow5.
She followed all the rules.
Even though they left her uncertain
Of the outcome
She still obeyed them
In order to
Transcend
Against the harsh boards of the bench, beneath the tinge of dark, I see the outline of space between the monkey bars and clouds. The covered slide now looks a steel blue.
She died in August. Midnight. In her hospital bed.
The teens left Lipton iced tea bottles on the ground.
She stopped walking soon after I went away to college.
I wonder if the little drops of tea residual freeze at night.
By the next summer, she forgot my name.
Maybe wild animals lick clean what’s left inside.
Her organs started to shut down that night.
I wonder what else gets left here.
A priest made the sign of the cross above her body.
Just remnants of whatever
And in the name of the Father,
People decide they
and of the Son,
Don’t want anymore.
And of the Holy Spirit
I skid my feet to stop the swing-
Her body is the condemned remnants of a temple that stood for a deity that never was. In the name of Siddhartha, I pronounce you Dead on Arrival.
A subtraction of sounds until all is inaudible.
No voices. No wind.
Sock Girl is constructing a city in her sleep. She has lined the streets with little lampposts that have everlasting light bulbs. Her home is near the river that runs through the center of the city. A balcony overlooks the tiny shops that line the riverside. Above, families in apartments are asleep in beds built to fit them, which they come back to every night.
Every. Single. Night. They come back.
I don’t know where she is.
I walk to the open field and kneel down into the grass.
Cease breathing and close my eyes.
Make the sign of the cross across my body.
And if I listen close enough, with my head between my knees and my fingers clasped out in front of me,
I can almost make out breathes,
so shallow and brief,
you could mistake them for nothing at all.
1. “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, T.S. Eliot
2.Deep Play, Diane Ackerman
3.”They Hung Him on a Cross”, American spiritual folk song
4. “Gloria”, Patti Smith
5. “Psalm 23:4”, Bible
