It is the sort of night that settles over the city like a woollen blanket, trapping the heat, the stars the thin holes in the weave. It is the kind of night that drapes shadows over houses and gardens, the streetlights mournful widows bent over with grief on the side of the road, painting walls and windows orange, flat. Two dimensional, like the cardboard façade of a cheap movie set.
The heat is the type that slips inside your shirt, gluing it to your torso with wet kisses. It is a dry, airless heat, reminiscent of sun-warmed dust from a country road settling in the bottom of your lungs as you roar across fields with the windows rolled down and your arm hanging out.
You sit, alone, on a swing at the local park, rocking back and forth gently. A slippery-dip rises menacingly from the gloom to your left, towering darkly in the stark orange glow of the streetlamps. The grass is brown and wilted beneath your curled toes, having long since submitted to the inevitability of a hot summer death. Your drag your feet through the dry dirt and it puffs like the country dust, clouding and swirling beneath you.
Something behind you cracks.
You barely hear it over the metallic creaking of the swing chains. You keep swinging back and forth mindlessly. It was probably just a twig, a stray cat. You don’t bother to turn around to check.
A round-a-bout sits silently in front of you to your left, still, motionless. You recall spinning and spinning with the laughter of other children in your ears, faster and faster and faster until you were flung screaming to the ground. You remember how much your knees and elbows had stung, how your vision blurred and the graze on the base of your left palm.
You unwrap your hand from the swing chain and study it. There. The scar.
Your mother had come over and dragged you to your feet, berating you and briskly bushing you off. When you refused to stop screaming and sobbing her voice had hardened and sometimes you can still feel the shadow of the cruel pinch she administered to your upper arm.
You had whimpered and fallen silent.
You’re jerked out of your reverie by a slow creaking. The round-a-bout in front of slowly begins to rotate and a hot wind springs up out of nowhere, blowing your hair about your face. You dig your heels into the dirt, stopping your motion, and tilt your head curiously.
Somewhere out beyond the glow of the streetlights the chain-link fence that surrounds the small park rattles and clinks.
The round-a-bout keeps turning, creaking like the joints of an old man, groaning like a fatally wounded soldier.
The sound of two glass bottles clinking together splinters the air and your head whips around, half out of your swing before you settle again. Nothing. It was nothing.
The warm wind rises, combing its fingers through your hair and slipping beneath your shirt to separate the damp fabric from sweaty skin. It feels nice, despite the temperature, and you close your eyes.
The wind almost feels like real fingers, brushing through your hair tenderly, almost like how you would imagine your alcoholic mother would if she could be bothered. Your shirt no longer feels like it is being gently prised from your skin, it starts feeling tauter, more tightly pulled, like someone has their hand fisted in it.
The round-a-bout stops spinning.
The streetlamps go out.
The quiet night of the park is pierced by one more sound. Just one.
A scream.
