Playgroung of Lost Toys

by Exile

  Your mother drove in silence for a time, prompting you to ask again.

  “That wasn’t her home.”

  “Grandpa says it was.”

  “There was nothing I could do.”

  “Grandpa says you wanted them to move her.”

  “I wasn’t going to lose her. Not again.”

  “You’d already lost her. She was dead, and you let them dig her up with all the others and put her in that stupid cemetery on Connor Avenue that she never liked.”

  Those weren’t your words, of course, but your grandfather’s. Back then you didn’t know your mouth wasn’t all yours all the time, so you watched your mother cry as she drove, your accusing eyes never leaving her face.

  For years you felt shame for your part in that conversation, as though your mother had had any say in the building of the dam, in the flooding of your grandfather’s village, in the relocation of the dead, or in anything that made you hate her in that moment.

  The truth is, you aren’t able to let go of your grandfather, not the way he wants you to. You drive knowing that, knowing you will see the disappointment in his eyes, however soon or late you arrive. The betrayal. If he can still speak then, he will tell you, Help me, let me go, and you won’t. If he can no longer speak, his eyes will plead and you will whisper that, no, you cannot. You cannot trust yourself not to follow him, despite your fears, and he would never forgive you for that, nor would your mother. You think, maybe he’ll be dead by the time I get there, but the thought only makes you drive faster.

  By the time you turned ten you’d given up on destroying the dam. As though it would have changed anything, brought anything back. Your grandfather had never seriously entertained that thought anyway, it had been another game, though he’d been amused by your crude chemical attempts in the kitchen over the years. And that was fine; you were getting a little old for that one. You’d learned there was no way to blow up anything that big anyway, except in the movies.

  “We could weigh me down with bricks,” he said, a frightful lucidity in his eyes. “So I could plunge down, down to her, to the houses, to everything that was then.”

  You didn’t have the heart to tell him your grandmother wasn’t down there, though you knew he knew that, that he willed her there anyway, that she would find her way to him, if only he made it there. Instead, you said: “I won’t let you die.”

  “ Oh, I would not miss a moment of this, of you, of your mama. The breath and breadth of all this. No. But someday I will leave you, that I cannot help. This is a thing for that final hour, when we have said our goodbyes, and I can still say mine to all that was.”

  “Oh,” you said, for somehow that did not seem so bad.

  “You know what? Treat it like a game, the last one we’ll play.” The finality of that made you squirm, but you nodded all the same.

  “But first, you must promise you will help me.”

  A strange sound greets you as you enter the room – your mother and grandfather are holding hands, and both their mouths are open. After a moment, you realize the sound is a laugh, a distorted thing that seems to come from far away. You cannot tell which of them is laughing, until your mother turns and stifles a sob. You walk over, take her hand in yours before turning to your grandfather. You see that his eyes are fixed on the ceiling.

  You are late, and your grandfather’s last laugh hovers in the air above him, an iridescent cloud shimmering like a dew-speckled spider web. You breathe him in, breathe in that great man’s laugh, that life, the memory of him weighing down the air.

  You were an inquisitive ten year old, so you had to test it, of course. You had to know, for him, because that had always been your way. And because you weren’t sure about this one. The pond by the backyard was the perfect site. You’d fallen in enough to know precisely how deep it was – cutting off at the shoulders, which left your neck and head periscoping out. The bricks felt grainy in your hands as you walked, the ropes around your wrists tight. You’d measured the ropes carefully; tied to the bricks, they came precisely to your feet.

  Your grandfather would go in from the boat, plunge straight down, so you did the same, in your fashion, and jumped into the pond. It was fall. The water was cold and patched with leaves. As your feet hit the bottom, a great brown cloud blossomed around you, and for a panicked moment you felt it close around your legs, its greedy maw chewing on your ankles. It was the dead from the river, you knew; they were here. You screamed, dropped the bricks. The dead pulled you down, harder than you thought possible. You felt them crawling up your neck, over your chin, until they touched your lips. Your fingers grasped at liquid dirt, dead leaves. But your lungs, those were still filling with air. Mostly air. You had no words, only breath, and that was how your mother found you. By then you were breathing deep, thinking of the houses and the river, of the dead who couldn’t harm you after all, not really, of your grandfather going under, and the feel of water down your throat.

  It was months before you saw your grandfather again, and years before your mother left the two of you alone.

  The river is restless, the boat moving over the surface like a skipping stone. Water sprays your face, damps your cheeks, your hair. Your mother sits beside you. Though you do not show it, you are not ungrateful for her presence. This is her place too, had been long before it ever meant anything to you. She has been saying goodbye for a long time.

  You feel calm.

  It is only when you see the roofs of the old drowned village that you feel it, that rumble, that overpowering urge.

  You kill the motor, lean over the boat’s edge, thrust your head under the water, and laugh. The dead are all around, watching, which is fine; you aren’t little anymore, you aren’t playing, and you need them there, because they’re a part of your grandfather, have been all along. You laugh with all your life and his – your teeth and tongue and throat shine, catch the light, so bright, so bright, and you feel the houses rising, lifting him and all he loved up with them. Your mother pulls your head up and you gasp for air. She holds you close while you wait for them all to ascend.

  TREASURE

  dvsduncan

  In death, much is lost and much is left behind.

  But children lack the experience, history and sense of mortality that gives special resonance to the relics of a lost life.

  They are not yet survivors.

  They simply are.

  Alive.

  My daughter Jenny saw boxes to explore, discovery after discovery waiting in dusty husks. She understood the reality in her own way. Nanna was dead, gone and never coming back. Jenny knew that but the deeper truth could not touch her.

  As she burrowed, I pulled another box from the shelf and folded it open. The past wafted up in thick clouds, clogging my nose and stinging my eyes. A tear found its way down one cheek. My mother had kept everything. Each box was neatly packed and just as neatly labelled. One contained greeting cards, perhaps every one she had ever received, all sorted in order by year. Childish Christmas cards from a boy I had not been for a very long time. Tender valentines from a husband a decade dead. A thousand other memorials. A lifetime of celebrations. I closed the box, rested my hand on the lid and then moved it to the burn pile.

  “Daddy, look at this,” Jenny chirped.

  She had found a box of my old playthings, but what she held made my heart skip a beat. It could not be real and it was. I could only ask, “Where did you find that?”

  It was a silly question but my daughter just smiled and pointed before turning her attention back to the treasure in her hand. I stared at it too. Surely, it had been no more than a childhood fantasy, an imagining masquerading as memory. And yet there it was.

  Metal plates slid beneath nimble fingers, seemed to multiply, fold at invisible joints, twist on pivots, grow, shrink and take any shape. I remembered that, the impossible ways it would become any imaginable thing. Believing had been easy as a child. Experience had taught me better.

  “Dear, can I see that,
please?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  She surrendered the toy without a second thought but her eyes followed as I lifted it to eye level. The thing was no more than a hand span high and had been twisted into the shape of a peacock. It was perfect in every detail. The head, the curving neck and the body were all just as they should be. The tail’s plumage was a delicate fan. Even the texture of the metal suggested feathers. I pinched one tiny plate between a thumb and forefinger, gave an experimental twist, grimaced and applied more pressure. I tried another. Then another. The pieces that had moved so easily in my daughter’s hands now refused me. Perhaps there was some trick to it, some forgotten way of moving and locking the pieces that younger fingers had discovered.

  “Silly Daddy,” Jenny giggled and snatched the toy from my hand. “Like this.”

  She illustrated by turning and folding the parts of the toy without effort. Each bit yielded as her fingers required. The peacock became a parrot.

  I stared for a moment and started to ask how she had done it but then let my eyes drift back to the rows of unopened boxes. The weight of the task pressed down on me. This was no time for childish things. I moved on to the next shelf.

  Jenny did not. She folded the little toy into many shapes, each more fantastic than the last. All the while she talked to it, cooed to it, and sang to it.

  Her prattling and silly rhymes ate away at me as I tried to concentrate.

  There were decisions to be made: who would get what, what to send to Goodwill and what to destroy. There were papers to sort. There was furniture to move. After that would come cleaning and painting. But I tried not to think too far ahead. It was better to focus on each task in turn.

  After hours of sorting the boxes, my mind was too full of times past to see the present. The sorted piles had grown but the remainder seemed even more daunting than before.

  “Time to go, Jenny.”

  “Can I bring the new toy?”

  “Of course,” I told her, “but it is not new. I played with that when I was a boy. What have you made now?”

  I knelt beside her as she proudly displayed a perfectly formed swan. The metal feathers gleamed silver in the basement light. I had vague memories of horses and lions but that was no more possible than the magical birds.

  “That is very good, Jenny. You are a real artist.”

  “It’s so easy. See.”

  Jenny moved her fingers over the little sculpture and the plates seemed to shift with a will of their own, as though they understood her desire and her vision. After a moment of disorder, a dove appeared.

  “That is amazing,” I said. I thought, Impossible.

  But perhaps that was a childhood gift; to believe impossible things, and I had been caught up in it for a moment. Or perhaps I was just tired.

  At first, I had little to say as we drove home and Jenny remained entirely engrossed in the toy. There were only glimpses of it as we passed beneath the street lights, a weird stroboscopic view of its evolving shapes. The wonder was becoming a little darker, developing a sinister edge.

  “Did you see any other toys you liked in the boxes?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Her hands never paused in their movement.

  “You can keep the other toys, too.”

  “They are sort of boy’s toys.”

  “I guess they are. They were my toys.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jenny had nothing more to say. She was under the spell of the toy once more. We drove for another twenty minutes and then pulled into our driveway. My daughter was out of the car and walking towards the front door without even looking up from what her hands created, nearly tripping on the front step.

  “Careful.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  The reply was automatic and absent-minded. A little metal sparrow rested in her hand. But for the colour, it might have been real.

  As I opened the front door, I told her, “It’s nearly bedtime. I want you to leave that thing downstairs when you go up or you will be playing with it all night.”

  “Aw, Daddy, I won’t.”

  “You will.”

  Jenny gave me a sulky look accompanied by an equally sullen nod. I extended one hand and she perched an owl in my palm. I looked at it and it looked back. It almost seemed to blink.

  “Good girl. Now teeth, face and hair. You know the drill.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  Jenny gave one more regretful look, the kind that says it will be a thousand years before she holds her treasure again but she is brave enough to endure even that. Then she turned to climb the stairway. I watched her go before turning my attention to the toy. Still holding it in my upturned palm, I walked into the kitchen so that I could examine it under better light.

  The plates were incredibly small and finely crafted, far smaller than I remembered, but then my hands had not been so large all those years ago. Experimentally, I tried to open a wing. At first it would not move and only with my thumbs wedged together did I manage to pry it open at all. The joint gave a bitter complaint such as a rusty hinge might make and shifted but a little. I pushed harder. There was no further give. Even in the brighter light, it was impossible to discover any lock or latch that held it in place. The tail feathers were no more yielding. None of the parts were. While they had flowed beneath my daughter’s hand, the little plates resisted my every effort. Finally, my fingers slipped in the slick metal and a sharp edge tore a red streak across the pad of my thumb. With a curse, I dropped the nasty little thing.

  It lay there on the tile floor, staring up at me as though in mockery. I stared back. Neither of us blinked now. Those metallic eyes continued to stare back as I raised my foot. They stared as my heel came down, crushing it with all the force I could muster. When my foot rose, the owl was a sad parody, twisted and bent. My boot came down again and again. With each blow I twisted and ground into it. I had put away childish things for a reason. And now I left only a scattering of metal parts on the kitchen floor. I finished, panting and confused. Numb.

  I looked down at what I had done, amazed by my own actions, and I felt a little sick. The marvellous toy was no more. I had shattered my daughter’s delight.

  And shattered my own.

  I reached down to pick up the pieces but could not bring myself to touch even one. Some cold dread kept me back, told me that I had done enough harm. It was nonsense and it froze my soul. I carried that chill with me up the stairs and into my bed where I lay awake, wondering what I would say to Jenny in the morning. That worry haunted the dark hours. In the end, I resolved to clean up the wreckage and say nothing. I would make the toy as mythic as it should have been. And then I fell into a deep sleep.

  Morning arrived with a windblown curtain. Sunlight splashed across my eyes and into my dreams. There was a moment of half-awareness. Then the events of the night before flooded back and I imagined the broken pieces gleaming on the tile floor. The clock told me it was after nine. The cold inside burned.

  I was halfway down the stairs when I heard her voice. The door to the kitchen was closed and the words were muffled. It was as though she was talking to someone. Then bursts of noise sounded, like fitful crying and the frost seared deeper.

  I eased the door open and then stepped back quickly as a metallic shape flew past. It moved too quickly for the eye to follow, dashed to the foot of the stairs and then back again to hover before me. It nearly touched my nose as bright eyes stared into mine. Wings blurred in motion and then it was gone, leaving me to doubt what I had seen. From within the kitchen, my daughter erupted into another peal of laughter. Cautiously, I looked into the room.

  She sat cross-legged amidst a thousand tiny metal bits, carefully selecting and fitting shapes with wings and beaks and needle talons.

  “I found the puzzle, Daddy. Look what it makes,” she cried in delight. “Let me show you.”

  All I could do was stare in wonder. When I had grown up, so much had been lost and so much left behind, but the
greatest tragedy had been the abandonment of magic. Perhaps I was not a survivor after all.

  I merely was.

  Alive.

  OF DANDELIONS AND MAGIC

  Christine Daigle

  My mother is seventy years old, but her brain is much older. Despite its short circuits she is tricky. She pretends happy compliance about moving from Thamesville to the retirement home near my Toronto apartment, but packing is more difficult than it should be. She’s recruited my daughter, Isabella, in her scheme. Isabella is naive to her methods, and my mom has encouraged my daughter’s imagination, inspiring her to come up with creative uses for junk. Anything to delay the progress I’d hoped for.

  Isabella sits cross-legged in the spindle rocking chair. She sways back and forth as she hums “Turkey in the Straw,” and her golden hair bounces in time with the beat. Isabella pulls out item after item from the box marked “trash”; taping buttons on a cracked knitting needle to make a fairy wand, and skewering scraps of fabric onto the matching needle to make a shoebox sailboat. Her repurposing ideas are endless. My patience is not and I breathe deeply to draw more from my small reserve.

  “Shauna!” my mom says and grabs my hand. Her fingers are cold and a chill spreads across my palm. I turn from the box of mothball-stale clothing I am filling. My mom points past the hallway to the open door of my old room. The single bed with the faded Holly Hobbie sheets is still there. The bed has always been small, even back when I was supposed to be small too. My gangly legs and simian arms hung over the edges. I took up too much space. I always did. In this house, in this neighbourhood, nothing ever fit right, nothing ever felt comfortable. Not much has changed for me in my so-called grown-up life in the big city.

  I look where my mom is pointing. The only other thing in the room is a rusted rabbit cage.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Don’t forget the rabbit.”

  “What rabbit?” Isabella asks. Pretty and perfectly proportioned, Isabella’s pink sundress swirls around her as she glides. She dances past her grandmother and me, then skids to a halt when her nose presses up against the flaking bars. “Hey, there’s no rabbit,” Isabella says. “Did he get out?” She drops to the floor to search.