Fiction 3

The old music, reconnection with an old childhood friend, has made me a little nostalgic.  Here's an old scene I wrote in that vein about my old elementary school, Mount View:

The crumbling blacktop in the afternoon sun, the blackberries we picked and ate until our fingers turned purple, the names carved in the silvery birch trees, the sand on the infield, the salamanders in the stream that runs through a giant storm pipe, the gently rocking swings where Paula Sager endlessly chased Steven Smith for a kiss, the rusted basketball backboards with rusted half-hanging chains that annually defied paint, the rain water trapped on the kindergarten side roof of the school.  Forty years of children.

There were hills of green and yellow crinkly-dry crabgrass; grass that fought back when you stepped on it. Silver bars of play equipment worn smooth, glistened in the sun while the torn fabric seats of the swings gently swayed in a ground hugging breeze that came down the hill and stretched out around the school; swirling the sand of the ball field before hitting the woods and shattering into hundreds of tiny streams that rustled the leaves of the trees.

A  patched asphalt path wound its way around to the back of the school where it joined itself then shot off in the opposite direction cutting through a small thicket of trees, forking and ending at perpendicular dead end streets.  At the center of the thicket was a small clearing with a large dead tree that never seemed to rot and  was polished smooth with use.  A  timid stream, its banks thick with skunk cabbage, trickled into a tiny storm pipe underneath one end of the school property and came out through a giant pipe at the other.  There were two basketball courts (or blacktops as we called them).  The oldest for the first, second and third graders; the other, which sloped in one corner by the blackberry bushes and pooled water, was for the fourth and fifth graders.

The echoes of children at play screamed silence when school was out.   A peacefulness that was filled with the sounds of nature: bushes, trees, insects and the stillness of approaching dusk.  A stillness so thick you could touch it and eat it until it filled you and with every step you would enter deeper into it until there was nothing left of yourself but the movement of your body through air.

I knew a girl who only made it half way through.  She died in a plane crash and whatever her name was it’s been absorbed by the stillness and will remain there forever.  Her face a blur like trying to peer through a filthy classroom window with the sun at your back.  

I stand on the ball field and shout the names of childhood friends and listen as they are carried off;  absorbed into the bricks of the school and scatter among the top branches of the trees. And they answer me back, each and every one, from the stillness, where no child is ever forgotten.