‘Are you doing a game today?’
A trio of apple cheek faces approached Sadie, a fourth grader who sat alone on the swing set. A lank of hair hung loose from a ponytail slipped low and limp to her ear. Empty seats swayed beside her. She cocked her head at them, these three kids.
On the black top, girls clustered in knots, some snapping their jump ropes, others clapping their hands and chanting their in-rhythm songs. Miss Mary Mack-Mack- Mack, all dressed in black-black-black… Sadie didn’t know the words, didn’t know the claps. The monotony of rhythm made her ears click.
Uninvited, never invited, Sadie—withdrawn to her lonely swing. Her brain swum off to the autumn leaves that crackled against one another and blew by her shiny red- strapped shoes. Nearby, a sugar maple’s branches had already gone naked, its fingers stripped of skin to the bone. There was just one three-lobed leaf, the last of the season. Bloody red, it clung to its spindly branch, tugged left and right with every wind breath.
‘You’re the game girl, right?’ the leader of the trio pressed. The other two blinked at her in unison, expectant.
Another chilly wind gusted and brought with it campfire air, and the power of Sadie’s great gift ballooned in the cavity of her chest. Called to action, she spun off on the wind, carried to her other places.
She planted her shoes in woodchips that crunched beneath her chunky heels like popcorn. Fists on hips, she swept her gaze across the playground, its apparatus flurried by the jumping, running, flinging and flailing arms of children. The balance beam and coil climber, the tube slide and drop slide, the merry-go-round, the spring riders, the monkey bars—all kaleidoscoped in quick succession, blinked in and out in geometric shapes. There, the plank of a pirate ship. There, the vine-slicked spiral of dangling jungle roots. A rocky cavernous steep, the long, arched neck of a Brachiosaurus, a twirling UFO, a dragon saddled for flight, the underside of a witch’s castle bridge.
Sadie considered the options and settled on one. She raised a decisive finger and pointed to the bridge, to the treacherous broken slats and misshapen poles clinking in that desolate wind. ‘There!’ she cried. ‘The witch’s castle! She’s kidnapped the king! We’re his only hope!’ and she was no longer just Sadie but Saint Sarah of Shuxhull, and off she rushed, her band of bold swordsmen keeping a quick step behind.
As they approached the bridge, shrieking monkeys and bats and harpies with curled claws and bloody fangs circled and swirled and shrieked. Saint Sarah called over her shoulder ‘Watch out for her minions! If you touch them they’ll poison you with their claws!’ and her valiant troop dodged the aerial beasts, somersaulted and jumped from their ghastly grips.
The bridge was guarded by the witch’s scythes, their faces lost in the shadow of their hoods, their robes swirling in black mists, so Saint Sarah crouched in the brush with her brave noble troop and whispered, ‘We must swing beneath the bridge to escape their notice. Make not a sound.’
‘But look!’ Her trusty lieutenant—a comrade in arms of many a battlefield— pointed below, far into the treacherous ravine. ‘If we fall, we’ll fall into lava!’ Indeed—how had Saint Sara not noticed!—the underside of the bridge glowed with the searing red light of molten rock, which churned and bubbled at 2,000 degrees.
‘We’ll need to cross fast,’ she warned. ‘Or the heat will burn us to ash.’
And so they embarked on their great and dangerous quest; they crossed the bridge, swinging from its underbelly, undetected only for the last of the scythes to see them and loose a piercing scream, so off they fled in a mad red rush!—a chase through the halls of the castle, a labyrinth beset by beasts at every corner—sadly, losing the youngest of their lot to battle with the minotaur—until they were able to take refuge in the dungeons’ deepest caverns; there they rescued the witch’s prisoners held in captivity for many a year, four of whom joined their band, and together, Saint Sarah and her two remaining warriors and the four prisoners who’d joined their troop climbed the trestle to the tallest crow’s nest where the terrible witch held captive their king.
But what was this? Treachery! For it was the king who controlled the demon army, he a secret warlock all along! And the witch not a devil’s consort but a good white witch of the wind guarding the world from his evil magics!
‘You traitor!’ Saint Sarah cried. She cradled the witch’s head. A frail bloom, now pale as bone, the witch lay dying in her arms from the warlock king’s deadly spell. Saint Sarah wielded her great sword at the warlock king, at his leering yellow eye and lips dripping with the smile of a snake. ‘You villainous malefactor! You’ve cost the lives of countless innocents! How could you betray your kingdom this way!’
The warlock parted teeth shaved to razor points, about to confess the motive for his great and terrible and atrocious and most heinous crimes, and Saint Sarah’s band of warriors raised their weapons to battle him, to avenge those dead and fight for those yet living, to bring this villain to his righteous death—
—a whistle called.
‘Recess over!’ Mrs. Murlock voice was static in the loudspeaker. ‘Line up!’
Saint Sarah’s band of mighty warriors dissolved. Their armor, their weaponry, their camaraderie shattered into a dusting of shimmering confetti, burst like a popped balloon and dispersed to the wind.
They scuttled off to the blacktop, average children once more. They gave no parting ‘bye.’ No ‘thank you.’ No ‘next time.’ Classmates congregated in lines. They grouped, amoebas in their little circles. Some jostled each other and peeled hurting laughs. The hand-clap girls’ stiff palms still snapped out their complex rhymes as they waited in line for their teachers to fetch them. Lemonade, crunchy ice, sip it once, sip it twice…
Sadie’s chest heaved, gulping oxygen. Her fingers tingled with ready-to-release energy: battles never to be fought, villains never to be vanquished, great lands never to be explored. The abundance in her mind that would never be made real. She hung back, not ready to return to the sterile classroom, to her lonely desk. She clung to the now-abandoned playground, to the vestiges of her other worlds. One swing clinked, swayed on an invisible giant’s breath. Sadie, a solitary figure with a ponytail hung limp over one ear, alone again.
L.A. Hawbaker is an artist and writer living in Chicago by way of New Orleans, Hawaii, Poland, and Prague. Her writing has appeared in Bright Wall/Dark Room, PopMatters, and Newcity Magazine, among others. You can find L.A. on Twitter @laurahawbaker or at www.lahawbaker.com.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.
