The thin film of night lifted - and for the first time in her three thousand eight hundred and seven days of existence, Jody saw the playground for what it was.
There was something about this twilight, a bald anxiety that ensued bringing to the fore of her consciousness the palpable decline of the day, of its last hopes, and promises. The night was a lacuna in the progression of time, it left Jody thinking things she could only experience in the impudent clarity of the day. Like the formidable strength of a human pinky that could contort itself into a weapon of unimaginable destruction. Like the belligerent jerk of a knee that could touch a nerve so deep in Jody's body that even the gallimaufry of laughing children was not enough to placate. Like the slanted precision of the eye that could eviscerate her insides, leaving them splattered on the cement sidewalk.
"Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized" Jody remembered reading- she would know, that Atwood, why the playground was giving her these twisted looks. Why the metal chains of its swing sets were slowly unfettering themselves from their clasps and combining like strands of hair- that Atwood, she would know.
Why the rigid topography of the slide was transfiguring into the liquid consistency of a wiggling tongue, Jody could not comprehend, it reminded her too much of the cherry colour that painted the insides of her mouth the time she bit into a beetroot mistaking it for an apple. How could she have known? It looked so innocent next to her lunchbox. How could she have known that sometimes to hate you need not have a reason at all?
But reason was the farthest thing from her mind- what reason could explain the now upright see-saw, that standing on its stunted legs made Jody feel her stomach drop. Etched in the rubber mulch of the playground was a crab with eyes that looked like boiled eggs, confounded in the squat position, Jody would often stare at its hind claws and grainy face with confusion- can crabs smile? Now the same creature was shifting its way down the playground's terrain, edging closer to the boundaries of this ‘Under the Sea' themed circus. Jody was quiet, always, observing the animal's ungraceful movements- like a splotch of paint that you throw at a wall, like a string of spaghetti that slithers down your shirt when the lunch tray folds in on you, like an ugly tear that rips across your face. From behind her bedroom curtains, Jody watched the crab peel from the floor, its two-dimensional frame rippling in the breeze as it regained balance.
Like a balloon untethered from the bunch, the crab drifted osmotically onto the merry-go-round, which itself was spinning in a surreptitious way.
"Ring-a-ring o' roses
A pocket full of posies
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down
Ring-a-ring o' roses
Jody has the cooties
Her left shoe! Her right shoe!
They both smell foul"
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Jody liked doing things backwards, sometimes she would sit backwards at the top of the slide and lean back as much as she could just to test the limits of her own body. The pull of gravity was tantalising and as her legs slowly loosened their grip on the metal railing at the slide's apex, for a millisecond, just a small blip of time, Jody felt as if she was falling and floating all at once. With the open air being her invisible catchment, she found a safety like no other. Of course, this was the same curious habit that ended up in her flush face being held down to the surface of the same slide on a particularly long summer's day. The ruby patch of misery shone on her cheeks like a red light for weeks after- "Stop! Look away, ok continue looking if you must!" She remembered how the others had pinned her hands in the cylindrical boundaries of the slide while Cassandra's fingernails dug deep into her hair "That'll teach you for dobbing on Minnie!"
Minnie- of course, how could she miss it? Minnie! It was Minnie's lithe shadow that had been hanging from the monkey bars all this while, and what's that, oh! It was Jess and Mel, they were the faceless knobs conspiring in the sandpit. And Cassandra, naturally, was chirping away at some nascent work of chalk art on the gravel pavement. Like the arbiter of the universe, Cassandra was now standing with her back to Jody, evaluating her latest creation under the flickering streetlight. The crab figure that had been regaled thusfar by the merry-go-round's gentle speed had crawled its way near the foot of Cassandra's pensive silhouette and seemed to be staring its vacant saucers at the same spot of Cassandra's gaze. What were they looking at?
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There is a place in our minds that wants to remain unknown. It is like the heel of your foot, sturdy and functional, carrying out its thankless tasks without notice. No one cares to probe the terrains of this place in any case, and so the ground swells, chanterelles sprout in the cracks where the moisture of memory resides and the wellspring of thoughts continues to emerge unbeknownst to any of us. But every once in a while, there comes a person who dares walk this land- touch the grass and breathe the vernal air- is it wrong to want to know the contours of your mind like the back of your hand? Or better yet, be the mind, become the thought that begins to form? This was the only thing Jody was good at doing. Not banana splits or cartwheels or chatterboxes, no, Jody's talent was becoming the mind. Not just knowing its tracks and trails, but actually becoming them.
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She felt a warm, tingling sensation at the tip of her ears and with a vigilance that she had always carried but a decisiveness that evaded her, Jody opened her bedroom window and crawled into the dusk that held her future in the palm of its hand. What were they looking at? Could it be? No, it can't, can it? The figures, shapes, abused and vandalised, arose from their various surfaces- the hexagon plastered on the monkey bars with obscenities; the units of measurements on the playmat with their fading inks; the sun on the play castle's roof with only 3 rays intact; Jody's deranged stick figure on the pavement: the day had come at last, the playground was alive and so was she.