Fearful Things

Slide

The slide has three rules.

1. One at a time

2. No climbing up

3. Rule-breakers are eaten

There were no signs that told us this. We just understood. The rules of the playground are law after all. Except it's not really a playground. No swings, no monkey bars, no seesaw. Just the slide. A single set of gray metal stairs lead up onto a platform. Steel bars line the edges so that you only have two options: turn around and return to the comforting earth or continue forward to the slide. It's made of rough plastic and circled completely around into a tube. Once upon a time it may have been a bright red, but time wore it down to a splotchy pink. The color of flesh.

It waits deep in the woods. It doesn't matter where we enter or what path we take—we always find it eventually. We can tell we're getting close when the forest sounds go quiet and the wind stills. The trees stop suddenly to form a circular clearing. Not a single blade of grass is found past the treeline, as if life itself refuses to move any closer to the slide sitting at the center. The first time I entered the strange place it felt like another world, like Narnia or Oz. Only the scary parts. When I looked into the silent sea of trees, I wondered if I'd ever find my way out again. But we always go back.

After a while, we got complacent. We forgot rule three. The first two are common sense, simple playground etiquette. But there are always people who ruin the fun. The clearing was packed as usual, and a boy named Eli was chasing a girl with a muddy worm in his hands; typical six year old behavior. The girl, Alyssa, stood at the top of the platform, shouting at him to go away. Eli positioned himself before the slide's exit and flashed Alyssa an evil smile before springing into the plastic tube. The heavy thumping of his feet as he climbed towards her caused Alyssa to scream and run down the stairs. But when she reached the ground, Eli still had not reached the top. In fact, the thumping ceased all together. I had been watching the two play from the ground nearby. Alyssa stood next to me and we exchanged worried glances. More and more kids began to notice the disturbance, and soon we all gathered around the exit in silence. Nobody volunteered to look inside. A quiet dripping echoed through the tunnel. No one could move. A thin stream of dark liquid poured from the darkness. It puddled slowly where the slide leveled out. The liquid collected, more and more and more, until it overflowed and spilled like a waterfall onto the dirt beneath it. The bright red stain finally snapped us from our senses, and we all ran home as fast as we could.

We tried to tell the adults. We screamed, we cried, we begged. But they wouldn't listen. No matter how many of us disappeared into the woods, no matter how long we were gone, no one cared. They just smiled and welcomed us back like none of it had happened. When we mentioned the slide, their eyes would glaze over and they'd change the subject. We tried to tell them about Eli, but they had no idea what we were talking about. His desk vanished at school, leaving a conspicuous gap in our neat rows that the teacher refused to acknowledge. Even his own parents couldn't remember. As if he never existed. That's when we believed rule three. After that incident, many kids decided to stop returning to the slide. But upon visiting their neighborhood playgrounds, they found that the equipment had disappeared. The swings, the jungle gyms, the merry-go-rounds—all gone. Only empty fields with ghostly divots in the ground remained. Several kids convinced their parents to drive them to the city park only to find the exact same scene. Everyone but the children that frequented these playgrounds found this perfectly normal.

We were scared. Terrified. I guess we could have just stayed home. It's only a boring slide a few feet off the ground. But we had to go back. We have to keep going back.

Because the slide gives us things.

The kids that found the slide entered the woods empty-handed and returned with gifts. Toys, games, candy. We didn't believe them at first but still followed out of curiosity for the strange playground in the forest. They gathered us at the top of the platform and told us to think of something we liked, something we really wanted. Thomas thought of baseball cards, his face scrunching with intense focus. He swung his legs into the tunnel and pushed himself down. At the bottom, he stood and started to call the others liars but stopped when he looked down at his hand. He was holding a pack of baseball cards. He savagely ripped open the plastic and spread the cards out in front of his face. They were all ones he had been searching for. While he jumped around screaming, the rest of us followed suit. Amanda thought of a stuffed rabbit. Jackson thought of a pair of shoes. I thought of a chocolate bar. When it was all finished, we gathered together and chattered excitedly about our magical presents. The rumor swept like wildfire, madness spreading like a disease, and eventually every elementary schooler had at least one mysterious item from the slide. Some days the line of eager recipients looped around the platform several times over.