The Mere Tide P80

The turnoff was hardly a mile distant. The pilot wheeled port and soon they were past the town marker with its brief hagiography. The houses moments later come into view squatted in blanched rainwashed resplendency. The streets not quite flooded. A porter in outsized rubber galoshes was unloading crates from his boxtrailer into the front of a convenience store sandbagged at the door. Other businesses above sea level were open. A few pedestrians avoiding the little traffic and the granular waves they shored. Some to notice others to not. The Deputy of Affordable Housing was oaring a rubber raft through an alley. A newspaper boy bicycling, his front basket full of wonders, leaving silical scrolls half out the mailboxes like rolled tongues. The pilot slowed to a stop.

How much?

Three dollars, he said wiping his brow. Three dollars.

The pilot deposited a silver eagle into his breastpocket and boy sorted through his basket for an unsubscribed scroll and synced it to the server of the Archipelago Register and handed it through the window. The pilot drove on, arm chickened out, somewhat cognizant of storefronts open or closed and full of wares. Past Holiday’s clinic where he looked up from his sweeping to inform a patient that his hours were from ten to four.

…its 2:58…

Past the library and around the school to the Matraple Tot Lot. They parked and the child scooted after the pilot as she got out.

In the playground were more children than she could remember congregated. Long haired, daint, straight of bangs or pony tailed, dirty, swarthy, pachephalic or ventripotent, freckled, mobile incubators of flu or pox, hued noon hues, emitting a grand melee of pealing, crying, laughing, a chorus, a sustained heterotone, the yackety-yack tessitura of a thousand peripheral worlds and somewhat unreal, concord of jubilee half-notes mispronounced by fear or ecstasy, the sudden outbursts of reproval, stymied embarrassments, thin braveries behind tears or regressed into lallation over the unceasing shoe clap raising red dust shimmering through the laurence in a cloister of pure ubiety where all are reprieved of past and future rung round the ambitus of adolescence marveling so rotten with remorse and jealousy. He clutched an anxious blond and curly his mathom talisman and snuffled and turned to run. Accruing hurts that will torment them in age if age they reach. Awing at the outsized parlousness of their feats. Rejoice but know thy judgment comes in guise of pebble or twig or crumb. They sadden quickly. They mope, they triumph. The ding of a bat can arouse spirits. Some shirtless in unknowing lewdity. Incipient romances bloom, their incondite conflict of interests forming but not yet manifest, revealing their selves before they learn to hide those selves in their selves, the unhidden selves too unformed to be properly hidden. The crazed sequence of causality guides their run and whirring geometries of arbitrary games that require the dizzying zigzag by rules are dictated. None here adheres to panmnesia though all mildly suspect or suspect without reservation a malevolent panpsychism without the bounds of this haven where their caretakers hold vigil.

Dachni looked at the pilot.

Yer saided of a sometin.

No.

Hess ye does.

The pilot leaned against the hood. Theres war in all of them. You can see it. How many will end in the lupanar? How many in the service? How many will be guilty of the crime of lugulary? They will instill the red dust with fear. They will put fear in red dust.

Mebbe bestis not ta go.

Try. For many this will be the only occasion for innocence theyll ever have.

Prolly not.

Probably not. Thats the crime I suppose. Go on.

Wheres your be?

Yonder bench.

Dachni looked to a bench where two mothers sat with their lactivorous spawn fastened to their breasts.

Ok.

Dachni stepped through the short chainlink gate to the realm sprawl of playground equipment and it was no small feat for her to understand her seeing. She looked back. The pilot was at the bench and the breasts were covered now. Dachni hobbled to the longest line that was to a slide. Several wide eyed waiters with grape smears over their mouths regarded her wordlessly.

Hidy.

Some helloed back. Others averted their gaze. Dachni wasnt sure what was expected of her so she kept silently beside and watched the line dwindle ahead as each child ascended the ladder. When it was her turn she had to go slowly favoring her good foot and arms to boost herself up each rung. Sitting under the hood feeling dumb, the metal hot through her shorts.

Hurry up.

She pushed off. A cool breeze rushed over her but when she opened her eyes it was not stone racing up to meet her. She slid down twice more because a trio of friends did and then she followed them to the monkey bars. They swung rung to rung as though theyd never left the trees but when the child tried she could scarcely keep her grip and it was only the terror of the fall that got her across. She hugged the sidepole and slid down. One of the boys pointed at her in disbelief.

What happened to you?

Dachni looked down at the withered cicatrix. Slightly raised or depressed. Strange white darkening of sprite white flesh. She didnt answer. Someone else inquired as to the erroneous blank of her eyes and she went away. She squatted by the carousel but nobody invited her to ride. The cheery faces flashing past. Bright teeth clean. She ran her tongue over her plaqued dentition. She sat on an empty seesaw chair and waited for someone to come but no one did. She pushed off a few times and after a while she sought out the three again. And found them at the tree swing. They were as tall or taller then her but she reckoned them much younger. They dismounted and waltzed dizzy and giggling.

Is ye cared to play?

They look at her where she stood just beyond valance and shrugged and ran off towards the sandpit. Dachni tried keeping pace but to run was agony and she stopped after a few steps. The three called out to her but she sulked away to the swingsets where she moped about until a vacancy presented itself and she narrowly beat another boy to the seat. He stood by impatient and glum. She observed how other kids made themselves go and she tucked her legs in and kicked out and soon she was rising. She shut her eyes tight and kicked and tucked, cherishing the momentary weightlessness at the extents of her amplitude. She was at this for almost a half hour, blind, mitigating the hot sun on her skin with the wind, saved from yielding her seat for the intermittent abandonment of seats by others until a boy tattled to his sow that she was hogging the swingset.

Aint ye a fuckin cocksuck, she hissed as she slid by.

She wandered back to the seesaws, apparently the most unpopular of equipment, and while she sat there she felt something tugging at her head. She looked down at a shy blonde of about five chewing on the end of her braids. Dachni thought this abnormal but then what experience had she of the customs of canton or shire.

Hidy.

The little girl chewed lost and bug eyed.

Is ye wanna take the other seat?

The girl shook her head. She was searching the playground for someone and the someone was jogging hither.

Allie quit eating her hair.

Ets aright, said Dachni.

He was a boy and he pulled the girl and she pouted the braids out of her mouth like a farewell.

Sorry about that, he said. She chews everybody.

Said it werentint no mind. Hey ye doan care on the other side uhs ye?

Im playing baseball.

Fuck is that?