The girl from the mire

3

                                          | | 3 | |

As she continues wandering the city, the mire girl comes across a small dilapidated park surrounded by blackened crooked red elms shedding bark. Plastic bags litter the branches and sound like flapping avian dinosaurs at the whim of the loose execrate urban wind. The trees encircle children' chain swings and broken decussate monkey bars. Purple paint flaking teeter totters and sunken silver slides complete the old playground. One slide is toppled and laying on the side of another slide, like a tilted corner worn crushed domino. Another slide looks like it's laying in the other's lap.

She imagines the ghosts of kids screaming and laughing upon the sadness that is the nostalgia of some sort of past. The swings rattle and squeak in her mind and fly higher and higher. The slides make quiet thunder as the kids hurl themselves down the shiny, wobbly little forty five degree gleam gray rivers of air and metal. The teeter totters grate and thud, jerking up and down between Heaven and Earth. And kids slap the jump rope against the permeable paving stones, almost whipping each other while others throw a baseball around, catching and releasing, breathing hard and talking about cubs and sox and laughing at each other in the tiny, high pitch voices of miniature humans.

There're two teenagers under a tree holding hands and smiling at each other, watching each other closely. Watching each other watch each other. The girl wears only gray and the boy wears only black. They're paying attention to nothing but themselves. They're happily infatuated.

She notices a man standing beside them, staring at her. Staring at her and not moving. A statue? How long has he been standing in the same spot staring at her? Maybe he's rusted and made of tin and in need of oil. He's old and gray and wrinkly pale, with long white hair and bushy curly eyebrows and he wears a gray suit with an unsized black fedora tilting toward one ear.

The vision of children playing games and having fun blows away like an old, dried out bucket castle in a sand box as she stares back at the old man. And the man remains standing by the disintegrating teenagers, just as she remains standing where she is. He's not an apparition in her head, at least not like the children were. He's not an effigy. And reality pushes against insanity and he does something the mire girl doesn't expect.

He opens his eyelids wide and his mouth clambers a clacking scream.

"Nooooooooooooo!"

The old man stumbles fromward and turns his back to the mire girl. His fedora tumbles as he bolts in a reaction of terror. She turns and prepares to witness danger from where she's come from. There's nothing prevalent in the hollow darkness. No monster. No beast to cause such a frightful display. Is she what he fears?

The mire girl yells, "Wait! Please, wait! Can you help me? I'm lost! Please!"

The man doesn't stop and so the mire girl removes her flip flops and chases after him, shouting like the burnt out echoes that the dusk has left behind.

"I just want to talk to you! I need help! Please!"

She runs behind him, out of the park and past the corpse skin trees and back into the cement and asphalt of the city. They run through a street that seems better maintained than any of the previous streets she's come across. No garbage, no skeletons in cars and the storefront windows aren't all smashed to fangs.

The man stops in front of a dusty, red tin dent panel building. The mire girl notices he has a skullet and he's begun limping and hollering imprecation and holding his knee like he's strained it.

The old man opens the single metal door to the building and slams it shut behind him. The sound of the door crashes upon its metal casing, bouncing off buildings and creating a dooming echo that fades with every vibrational reflection.