Slipping Away

You blink, and before you is a young boy idly swaying on a swing set, using one foot to swivel himself from side to side. You are behind him– haven’t yet seen his face, but a submerged memory resurfaces as your eyes settle on his fuzzy, opaque form.  

“Hello?” you call. Your voice carries a short, sharp echo as if invisible walls surrounded you on every side. The boy, who was staring at his Superman sneakers, sits straight up.  

“Swing with me?” He asks, still without turning around. You move to oblige, velcro sandals crunching over playground gravel.  His strange apparition-like appearance isn’t just him, you realize. You hold up a hand and aren’t surprised to see the swing set through the other side. The rest of the playground seems shrouded in a thin mist. 

In spite of this odd revelation, you settle into the swing next to him before asking the obvious. “Am I dead?” You try to copy his movements, before realizing your legs are now too short to touch the ground while sitting. 

“Of course,” he says while continuing to avoid eye contact. “And so am I.” 

“Right,” you say. “I thought it would be more dramatic than this. Singing choirs of angels, and all that.” 

“So did I. But I got used to it. An eternal playground isn’t all that bad.” You look around and have to agree with him. This park is beautiful– the tallest and most colorful slides you’ve ever seen, countless monkey bar sets crisscrossing into the heavens, and perpetually spinning merry-go-rounds.  

A small, boxed-up piece of your mind recognizes it as one of your favorite childhood hangouts. When you squint, all the splendor melts into the mist, leaving a molding, sun-baked sorry excuse of a jungle gym in its place. Even from here, you can spot the tic-tac-toe game you scratched into a pole with your big brother one summer.  

“I know you,” you finally say. This seems to be the sentence the young boy was waiting for. His head dips in acknowledgment and looks up. He is still missing the same teeth you remember, though the memory is as ungraspable as the haze swirling around. “This is exactly how I last saw you.”  

“When you had to go home for supper at your grandparents. And my family hit the road again a few minutes later after this quick stop for me to play,” he filled in the memory. “Did you die that day?” 

“No,” you’re surprised to hear such a blunt, dark question from a six-year-old. “I lived a decently long life, by modern standards.” You wonder why he would ask such a thing. “Did you?”  

“No,” he replies, and you might have exhaled a long, held breath at that answer in life, but you discover there is no longer air in your lungs. “But I didn’t live long anyway,” he continues. “Twenty-five. Drunk driving.” 

Once again, you’re struck to hear a child speak in such a way. “I’m sorry. That must have been so scary.”  

The boy laughed, with a surprisingly bitter tone. “Don’t be. I was the drunk driver. I’ve spent every moment since I got here praying I didn’t take anyone else with me, but I suppose that’s unlikely.”  

You do the math in your head– you’d been a few years younger than your playmate all those years ago– and decide to shift the subject. “You’ve been here for 50 years?”  

“Is that how long it’s been? Feels like a couple of hours.” He kicks a patch of gravel, and it sprays in an arch before cascading a few feet away. It causes a ripple in the mist, like when a stone skips across a pond’s surface.  

“Are we in Hell, then?” You muse. It isn’t something that would cross your mind if the boy hadn’t nonchalantly voiced his cause of death. 

“Who’s to say? You’re the first person I’ve seen here. It’s strange. This whole time, I’ve had the feeling of waiting for someone.”  

“I think Hell would be hotter than this, and I’d hope heaven would be… any temperature at all, really. This lack of feeling is quite disconcerting,” you surprise yourself with a concise description of what bothered you the moment you appeared in this void. The lack of sensation wasn’t just limited to your bodily functions like breathing or heartbeats– there’s no metallic, tangy scent to the swing chains, nor any pain to your hands when the chains twist the wrong way and pinch your palms. “What have you been doing, all this time?” 

“Swinging,” he replies. “And tracing the graffiti on the play set. Was any of it yours?”  

“Want to see?” you ask, and hop off of the swing. Your feet sink into the gravel as you land, and you can almost hear the chatter of children you associate with this place, playing under the sun summer after summer. Through the mist, you swear you can see Kassie Robinson and her baby brother playing in the sandbox, Jacob Neals perched on top of the tunnel, and the Roseburgs climbing the rock wall leading to the steep, metal slide.  

You shake yourself out of the past before starting toward the main playground structure. The boy follows suit, and when you glance at your shadows you realize with a start how young you’ve become. Even if you weren’t aware of your height, you can just make out your youthful facial features and a small, unconscious skip in your step, one braid bouncing between your shoulder blades as you move. “It’s over here,” you point to the pole your tic-tac-toe game is etched on, the central support for a platform leading to the tube slide. The mist around you flickers, and the faded red slide shifts to one ten times as tall and bright purple, before returning to the one you hold fond memories of.  

The boy examines it carefully, tracing the lines, then the X’s, then the O’s. Even after all this time, from your perspective, it remains as prominent as ever. “Which one were you?” 

“X’s,” you say. “Benny didn’t trust me not to slice my hand or worse if I had to carve a circle. He got a pocket knife from Grandpa as a birthday present, but he wasn’t supposed to take it out of the yard. I think he would’ve gotten away with it if Grandpa hadn’t noticed flecks of red paint on the blade later that week– and if Benny hadn’t come home with a big gash on his hand from when he almost dropped it.” Another memory strikes you, and you lift a hand to rest over the game. “He made us paint it over the very next day.”  

“I remember your grandpa coming to get you for dinner. He seemed strict, but kind. How often did you visit them?” 

“We stayed here most summers. My parents took seasonal jobs at national parks when our grandparents were still young enough to take care of us– that’s how my parents met, working information booths at Yosemite National Park. They hated to give it up, so when we were a little older they started dropping us here for the summer before heading west. My grandparents had to move to a care home in our state two summers after we carved this. I never came back,” you duck out from under the platform, despite having no need to watch your head. The rickety old playground of your youth shines through without a barrier, now, dispelling the flashy false one. The warm lens you viewed life with back then is gone, but the familiarity of it all makes the piece of junk glow all the same.  

“I can’t remember what surrounded this park in life,” the boy says, following you. “Can you?” 

“Oh, of course,” you say with a smile. “My grandparent’s house was that way–” you point back toward the swing set. “And another street was right there. But it was right next to a small field we used for kickball before it turned into the woods.” If it was just the old playground surrounding you, you’d be able to see the solid swath of oak trees to your left, but the brightly painted plastic, though faint, blocks your view.  

“Can we go see?” The boy asks, and it occurs to you he hasn’t ventured out from the heart of the playground during his time.  

You weren’t supposed to wander too far into the trees when you visited here, but your grandparents allowed you and Benny to explore the forest’s edge. The towering oaks with sturdy branches that reached higher into the side than you dared try climbing always captured your imagination– they served as pirate ship masts, castle keeps, homes to fairies or monsters. When you were a little older and beginning to take an interest in your parents’ outdoorsy side, you always wondered how the trees looked in the other seasons– you saw them perpetually in their prime, year after year of summer green leaves before the autumn. How would they appear now, in this dreamlike place? “C’mon,” you say. “I’m curious, too.” 

You weave between the poles, platforms, and slides, trusting your internal compass to keep you on track, and trusting the boy is following behind you. You finally emerge, victorious, at the line where the gravel and grass meet. You remember sitting right here, on rare “time outs” for bad behavior, digging pebbles from the dirt and returning it to its rightful place. The grass itself doesn’t look quite right– it’s not nearly trampled enough for real estate right next to a high-traffic area. The line of trees across the field, however, is nothing like you remember. The leaves are a wonderful russet red, brighter than any you saw in life. You have the urge to race over and pluck a fallen leaf off the ground for your grandfather’s memory book, just like you did with the summer colors all those years ago.  

“There’s someone here for you,” the boy pulls you out of your trace. You tear your eyes from the tallest oak, the one you and Benny always tried to climb, which covered your hands in cuts and flecks of bark. The boy points to the forest floor at the treeline, where a man emerges from the shadows.  

Weight returns to your chest as air fills your lungs. You can breathe again. The man walks a few more paces and then stops about halfway between the playground and the woods. “Grandpa?” You whisper. He nods in assent– he must have heard you.  

You realize the extravagant playground behind you has disappeared from view completely when you turn back to the boy, leaving your memory looking stark without the mirage. You think he’s beginning to fade along with it, but when you look down you realize your entire torso is completely transparent. The boy looks up at you, his eyes looking much darker, and you can see the 25-year-old driver who left life in such a horrifying way ever so clearly under a child’s face.  

“I won’t see you again.” You know it’s true as the words leave your mouth.  

He shrugs. “Just like last time. I think that some people just aren’t meant to be in each other’s lives– or afterlives– except fleetingly.” 

You can feel your hold on existing here begin to slip away, but you try to hold on for a few moments longer, like a child fighting sleep past their bedtime. It awakens a new memory in you, one of sharp hospital lights and a heart monitor that chimed slower, slower, until it stopped. Is this how it felt to die? It must be, and you hope so. Your grandfather is still in the near distance, but you know the time it might take him to reach you doesn’t matter. He’ll accompany you on to the next place regardless.  

“Where am I going?” Your body exists in two– two realities– simultaneously. It’s a strange sensation to be aware of, and the space one you cannot see envelops your body in warmth. Your left arm has faded entirely from view. You jolt when a hand takes your veiled one, and when the unseen palm squeezes you feel a familiar pocket knife scar, rough against yours.  

“I don’t know,” the boy says, and you understand. He will never leave here– has likely been here for decades without knowing, waiting on a stranger, kicking his feet in the dirt and swaying on a swing set.  

“I’m sorry,” you say. Impersonal statements of empathy are all you can give him. 

The boy smiles. “It’s not so bad.” He gestures to the playground behind him, now rapidly blurring in your vision. “This is a place I only have happy memories of. Thank you, for that.” 

You don’t know what to say. You’re welcome, or goodbye seem so trivial when leaving someone alone in an eternal limbo. “I hope you can find some peace,” you decide on. He nods and walks back toward the playground, leaving you to dissolve into the mist.  

When you finally enter the next plane, the boy is back on his swing, chains squeaking as he soars higher and higher into the sky.