Enhance Productions

The air smells yellow on the playground. A playful kind of yellow, but also slightly dirty. Like playdough once it loses its plastic cherry scent.The air hangs, stagnant. A clear fog wafts through the playground’s metal-jungle gym-climber, its metal swings and hard-plastic spinners. I climb up the steps of hole-ridden stairs and come to the top of the fire pole. Looking over my shoulder, I see my grandfather wave from the bench behind me. The sun’s fever should be burning my thighs as I wrap myself around the surprisingly cold metal. Better though, because I wasn’t thinking about what a bad idea it was to go for a slide in my denim shorts. I shimmy my feet, sticking my sneakers tight enough together so that I’m standing in midair. I take a deep breath before the plunge. 

Rather than finding sand in my socks, the pole catches. I’m sliding for about a half a second until I’m suddenly stuck. I’m nowhere near my friends or family anymore. I am standing at the bottom of the fire pole, still wrapped tight, but twirling around it on crumb rubber ground. The once open sky is now an elaborately painted fresco on the walls. Rather than the ice cream man who was parcelling out bomb pops, snow cones, and choco tacos to the raucous children of summer, parked next to the beat up red Mazda that lives on that corner of Beverly street, there is a giant see-through curved wall of plexiglass in front of me.

I am alone on this artificial playground, but I am not entirely by myself. I am being watched. Dozens of adult men and women are staring at me. My gaze travels through the lot of them, running up and down and back again. Their arms, legs and torsos blend together. Their bodies making an intimate, but at the same time grotesque, mosh pit. They stand facing me, watching me, waiting to see what I am going to do next on the pole. They don’t seem to care if I notice them or not, but their gaze never leaves me. They don’t stop what they’re doing to each other. Hands scratching at the necks of faces that I cannot see. Naked bodies are scarred with cuts whose date of origin are indistinguishable, some clear raised skin- maybe years old, most freshly red, and others stained with black dried blood. Skin hangs off the mangled bodies, fat from arched backs and clenched abdomens moves with fast fervor Eating. Killing. Fucking. Blood is on the walls, and moving body parts blend together with amputated limbs. I scream.

All of the sudden I’m back above the ground, on my playground. My grandfather, sitting across from me (on a comically small bench for his 6 ft. 4 stature) is totally unbothered and still trifling with his crossword. I’m holding onto the pole with white-knuckles. I take a deep breath as I slowly start to let myself slide down the pole again. 

I’m back in the artificial grass. The glass is gone. So are the people. I can feel tension rise in my whole body as I’m painstakingly aware of people around me. I can’t see or physically feel them, but I know they’re there. I know they are touching me. My hands are bound by invisible string. I begin to feel thread tightly wrap around me starting from my feet. My airways constrict. My body becomes heavy. My eyes become blurry. The world turns black. I cannot scream, cannot speak. I can no longer even hear the world around me. I can hear them jeering at me. Mocking me. They’re touching me all over and laughing.

At the same time I am suddenly aware that I am not real. I know I have only ever existed in this container– on this plastic playground. Everything else was purely a sophisticated day-dream; a form of disillusioned compartmentalization; a lie within a lie. I was living an existence lacking any value or meaning. Apathetic regard for human life is normal and familiar again. Disregard for pain returns its gaze onto me. All there ever was is sin that steals. Sin, whose scent wafts through playgrounds like an unfamiliar memory. 

I cry out.

The next thing I know, I’m sitting in the sand, with my head in my hands. I’m screaming and crying, and my grandfather runs over to me. I just cry and cry and cry. 

My grandfather drives me back to his and my grandmother’s house. We stop to grab takeout for dinner from the restaurant my grandmother used to like to have family birthday dinners at. We eat together back home as a family. The wooden kitchen cabinets nearly drip in the heat of the summertime. We watch tv until we are are too tired and midnight creeps by. I go to bed. I wake up in the same house I just ate dinner in, no longer within my dream. Back home in my room.