The Park

by J. M. Bédard

The park was a constant in my short life, an inverted island of hard grass and a few rough rectangles of cracked pavement. A climbing structure, a swing set. A sharp metal slide, nearly vertical. The area was bordered on three sides by small hills, sloping away from a sleepy neighbourhood. While not steep, the ground always seemed to be slipping, melting as though shrugged off the broad shoulders of the sidewalk above. A river clung to the fourth side. The water’s edge was velvet, thick with rotting plants and deep green mud. A few trees, wrenched and twisted with age, dipped fingernails just below the surface and, on days heavy with heat and damp, brought their cheeks to rest against the relative cool of the water. The air was lacy with insects, an expanse of gently billowing curtains. Some younger reeds and saplings sucked eagerly at the muck, hollow with hunger and eyes blackened by gnats. Swans lurked in the shallows as well, watching and listening, feverish as they waited for night to fall. Arrogant and wasteful, their nests were often strewn with small, half-eaten bodies they hadn’t been bothered to pick clean. On a few occasions, hearing the screams, we would crawl closer and take bets on whether one might drag itself away.

There were no houses on our side of the waterfront, only across the street from the park, and on the other side of the river. We could catch glimpses of their docks and boats, their lawn chairs and wide blank windows, dancing and shimmering in the breathing haze. Sometimes we heard snatches of music or voices, and one summer the breeze tasted of grease-streaked meat for a week straight. I used to strain my eyes, to rub my fingers raw searching the air for a crack or tear through which I might look. It was most frayed near the river, tattered and stained where it had been chewed up. But of course, so were the people.

As children, we mostly stuck to core features of the park. The rusted geodesic dome, originally built of triangles but many of which had grown warped and bulbous. A slide, knife-sleek and shining, whose surface burned no matter the time of year. And the swings. Seats wide and soft as mouths, they rasped together in low tones before falling abruptly silent whenever anyone approached. Their chains nipped at idle hands, so that by winter most links were stuffed with at least one finger. Sometimes they caught tongues as well. Before the first frost, a worker employed by the city would arrive in a creaking van to clean up, digging out all the flesh before tossing everything into a bucket and carting it away. One time, after an afternoon spent intently watching this work, the man who had been dispatched to clean let me carry the bucket back to the road. It was heavier that I thought and ungainly, as its contents crawled and thumped around, kissing the soft plastic. The man made it up the hill and to the van before I did and stood, backlit by the gathering dusk, to watch my progress. It was nearly dark when I got to the road. Although it wasn’t a particularly great distance, time was sticky in the park.

I was slick with sweat when I arrived, the spice of fall air thick in my throat. The man nodded wordlessly and hauled the bucket into the van before leaning in close and reaching towards my wrist. Lifting it slightly, he picked off a finger that had crawled across the hem of my sweatshirt and clung, curled into the edge of a pocket. He was crouched so that we were eye level, close enough that I could see the waves churning beneath his skin. They were choppy, tugging across his cheekbones and exposing the pale underbelly of his eyes. He put the finger in my palm and curled my own hand around it, and then both of his around mine. Nodded again and slipped to his feet and climbed back into the front seat. I watched the van glide away, glowing milky in the faded night, until it rounded a corner and was swallowed up.

I kept the finger at home for a little while, in a small cardboard box lined with tissues that I perched on my bedroom windowsill. It liked to watch the moon, drink in its cold light and sway slowly back and forth. It left when it managed to pry open the window. I woke the following morning to rain-stained covers, cold air sucking at my cheeks.

One end of the park narrowed to form a sort of point, where brackish water kissed the edges of crumbling dirt and rushes gave way to squat ferns and a thicket of tall, waving grass. It was nothing like the stubby vegetation that covered the rest of the field. That was short and brittle, patchy and yellowed unless it was covered by snow. This grass was elegant. It reached higher than the fence that disappeared behind it, and the bushes beyond that which, backing up a hill, eventually gave way to the road and the neighbourhood. Each blade of this grass was sharp and flat, slightly silvered and flocked on one side. The other was like fiberglass, a biting, pinching softness. It hooked into exposed skin, leaving a constellation of tiny shards and a blushing rash.  

From the outside, the grass didn’t appear to cover an exceptionally large surface area. But something about the way it waved, always dancing, could easily suck away the hours. Time and distance caught between the blades grew bloated, rotting in swollen heaps among the younger shoots. I usually found it stank of peppermint in the heat, although some others swore it was more like vanilla. One especially hot summer everyone agreed it was candy apple. A sugared ache curling up your back teeth. I was drawn to it just the same as the other kids, pulled easily from all corners of the park until we formed a loose crowd. The air was so sweet. Coating my throat, pricking my eyes. I licked my lips, squinting up at the grass. It smiled. And then all at once we were on our hands and knees, panting, long threads of drool splitting sunlight into diamonds that fell and crunched like hail beneath our feet. The sun seared the tops of our heads before slicing cleanly through our skulls, pulling our faces into smiles. Wider and wider. Baby soft skin straining and splitting, the grass pulling us onward across the bucking earth. I crawled near the back of the group, face upturned to catch the sugared slurry streaming down in currents around us. Until my knuckles stubbed against something hard and smooth. My neck popped as I forced my head down, screwing up my eyes to focus on the soil as around me, the rubber-limbed bodies of other children continuing to inch forward. They were bright and shining, a faint cocktail of bug spray and sunscreen and sweat trailing delicately in their wake. My skin tugged forwards too, straining against my arms, my shoulders. My back. Without thinking, I gripped the object tighter in my fist, my other fingers scrabbling for purchase at the dirt. Heaving, I wrenched backwards, cracking my head against the ground as bright shadows burst and wheeled across the sky. An unconscious movement, like a sneeze or a hiccup, thoughts still swirling full of dancing grass. My one hand clenched so hard I felt blood prick beneath my nails while the whole world, all straining and screaming, suddenly burst, leaving a deafening, echoing silence. A ruptured quiet, hollow and sagging.

The earth steadied and stiffened beneath my back and I noticed that the weak breeze slipping across my cheeks was light and smelled only of damp, tasted only of rain and sweat. My breathing steadied as I watched the sun beam gently and long, pale clouds stretch and drift across the sky. I inhaled deeply and felt their cool arms wrap around my mind, dripping between my eyes and down the bridge of my nose, turning it numb. My hand twitched. Or rather, something in my closed hand twitched. I rolled onto one side, prying open my fist. The finger. Curled tightly into itself and nestled in the deepest part of my palm. Ringed with small, bloody runes where my own nails had bit into my skin. The finger was warm, with a weak heartbeat a few seconds faster than mine, a discordant thrum that trickled up my arms.

Cupping the finger carefully, I blinked dirt from my eyes, brushed hair from my face, and scrambled to my feet. The park was as it had always been. Stubby yellow field, bleeding into the river. Swing set, slide, climbing dome. Tall grass. It drifted calmly in the still air. Further away, kids were running about and pushing each other and prodding piles of dirt with sticks. Jumping off the ancient metal play structures and shrieking as they slid or fell. I let the sounds wash over me for a moment, eyes drifting closed, opening them only as the finger squirmed slightly in my hand. I hadn’t noticed that I had started walking back towards the grass. Now that I was closer, it seemed denser than I remembered. Muffled voices wafted from the thicket and I felt a tugging at the edges of my cheeks, hundreds of invisible strings pulling the corners of my lips up and out, into a grin.

I squinted into the blades. They hadn’t gotten thicker everywhere, I realized, just a patch in front of me, like a reverse doorway. I watched as the grass in that spot became tighter, arching and bulging as it sucked forward, forming into something new. A dangling head grazing a chest, arms and legs the last to pull free. And then a sharp pain as the finger sliced its nail in a wide arc across my palm. It fell from my own splayed fingers and crawled frantically away from the grass, back into the middle of the field. I stumbled after it, each step heavy and heaving, time turned to syrup. I managed to catch up to the finger only when, with a ripping suction that made my ears crack, I burst forward and the air whistled thin and clear once more. I didn’t turn back to the grass until I was by the swings, at the far side of the park. The tall blades waved softly, as a velvet dusk began to fall. Honeyed at first, the setting sun gilded the very tops of the neighbourhood roofs before giving way to long purple shadows that curled outward as they cooled. The houses and docks on the other side of the river shimmered just a little bit longer in the waning light, the sun seeming to settle there and coat them in a brittle dust.

We found him the next day, sitting slumped just inside the half circle of shade cast by the thicket. The shell of a child, emptied of flesh with skin stretched tight over a stuffing of grass. It stuck out through his eye sockets and toothless mouth, the occasional blade peeking through an arm or a leg. Piercing the fabric of his clothing. It was stained like mine. Overhead, bleached clouds scrubbed the sky blue while behind him, the grass rippled in silken waves.

By the time a van from the city crunched to a stop on the nearest street, the child had fallen over on his side. There were two cleaners this time. Neither of them seemed familiar but I couldn’t be sure. The sun was high and strong and they wore thin paper masks across their mouths and noses and thick shining glasses over their eyes. They worked efficiently, moving gracefully in a series of well-rehearsed steps, and soon all three were gone. I stood with the small cluster of other children, watching quietly. Until, one by one, they drifted back deeper into the park.