lloyd dobler

he watched his children play on a playground hidden behind his house.

this is how they played:

the children would run and jump and swing and throw and slide. they imagined that they were sailing on the ocean or firing guns or fighting fires or holding strong against a siege. the sand was sometimes food--or lava. the playground was stone and wood and bolts and sand and tin and everything. it was large but you could hear the children say anything clearly, even from the backyard when the stereo was on.

sometimes the playground reminded him of structures within a city he once fell into. it was endlessly deep like the ocean and he had been scarcely able to swim out.

it was autumn and he could remember another autumn when he had been young and he went to a city for the first time. there were no trees there and he wondered how the people could tell what season it was. by the lights and the horns and the people and the window displays he decided that everything changes but the seasons in the city and he asked momma but she did not answer. he wondered about the raindrops and the snowflakes and the leaves and if christmas ever came there.

and when he ran out into the street he remembered the lights and the horns and the concrete--but the car had stopped in time. momma pulled him along as he dragged his feet. she told him that it was okay to bump into someone while walking on the sidewalk, but that was nothing compared to being hit unexpectedly by a car, because you fly and spin in the air and fall and bruise and hurt.

he hadn't understood his mother until he saw between the dull harpoons of his friends' white whale narratives--glorified and empty--one afternoon. he saw emily in the courtyard and she said hello and he said hello back and he saw her hair swirling with his thoughts and he knew he had wandered out into the street again.

(he had always thought of storks dropping babies to their mothers when he jumped from the airplanes.)

and he heard her voice calling his name from inside.

and when he paused to feel his son tug at his pant leg in a way the shrapnel hadn't, bill vilim recalled the moment--in the bottomless city--when everything around him suddenly became more precious and he smelled with more potency and tasted with more variety and saw with more clarity and hoped with greater certainty.

he remembered ignoring the swirling in his leg as he lay cradling a jammed and useless rifle in his arms like a small child. he waited silently, listening to the rifle's sisters and brothers coughing and spitting ammunition at one another in the dry city air, like playground plague.