Fever

Two mothers sat together on a park bench facing a playground of spidery-shaped objects, while two children—a boy and a girl—snaked through the various lanky, limb-like poles and dangling chains. After a brief but friendly acknowledgment between strangers, the women swapped intimacies generally reserved for old friends. Likewise, the children pushed and kicked and teased like siblings.

Opaque shadows tentatively attached to wispy clouds danced across the pebbly playground; and temperate rays of a muted, October sun stripped the light jackets from the running children—which were discarded in a forgotten heap. Cindy’s long blonde, messy hair turned just after she turned and jumped just after she jumped. John Patrick kicked and tripped, rebounded and slipped. The two nine-year-olds were cyclones spinning their way over, under and through every sorted surface.

Most times the periphery of a mother’s eye is the most active, and as the two women talked, the natural saccade of their eyes searched protectively for their child. However, for the children, the world ceased to exist just beyond their reach. On some level, maybe only where the darkest thoughts reside, both mothers registered and stored away the incident under the long, sloping legs of the slide. The moment of John Patrick’s obsession had just begun.

Only one person knew about the rusty razor blade carelessly flopping inside John Patrick’s pocket and only one person would ever know. Could a life obsessed by dark pursuits have been prevented if only one other person had known?

Cindy tripped and during chase John Patrick collapsed against her and the slide. Popping up, pushing her pink skirt onto her thigh, Cindy ran a finger across little droplets of blood and pebbles imbedded into her knee. Lying prostrate just below the fall of long blonde hair, John Patrick slid the razor blade out, swiped it through the air, gathered his catch and stuffed it down into his back pocket, while the little rusty blade disappeared as easily as it had appeared.