The residents at Avalon Assisted Living watched all summer long as the district upgraded the elementary school playground across the street. The new playground, called The Moon Castle, had five multi-story play structures made of wood and colorful plastic, tire swings, monkey bars, rickety suspension bridges, battlements, lantern-lit subterranean tunnels, high-pressure water cannons, and a freakishly long teeter-totter that lifted the children high into the air. The centerpiece was an enormous spire with a pointed roof, and a bright yellow slide rolling out of it like a petrified tongue.
When the school year began, the Avalon residents watched the children play. The kids clambered and shrieked and chased each other. They swung from ropes and blasted each other with water. One after the other, they climbed the tower and went down the long slide.
Sitting in plush chairs in their robes and slippers, some of the residents were reminded of their happy childhoods. Others scowled over fruit cups, looking out the long windows with bitterness. They had never had a playground like that. They had had to work from a young age and played with rocks and sharp pieces of wood. Their lives had been hard, and it was difficult to see children whose lives were so lucky. It was difficult to know they would never be young again.
They watched the children day after day. Soon the residents got to thinking: Wouldn’t it be interesting to play on it, just to see if they could?
One night they snuck out and crossed the road. When they reached the playground—
which was even more incredibly massive up close—their old instincts came back. They chased each other over the bridges in their slippers. They did the monkey bars. They slid down the slide and lost their stomachs. They tagged and hid and sought. It was still there, whatever the kids had. It had been there the whole time, just in hiding.
One of the residents remembered something. In his backyard growing up there had been a hundred-year-old oak, which he climbed every day of the summer. At the top of the tree, he saw the woods, the cornfields, the county road in the distance. The best view of his life had come early.
He had not thought about the tree in years but thinking about it now made the urge to climb return. He took the stairs to the top of the slide tower. Then, he tried to get on the roof. It was not easy. He barely had the strength. But he made it up there and sat precariously on the slanted plastic. The view was lovely.
Then it began to rain. The residents scampered back across the street. The man on the roof tried to get down, but the roof became slick with sheets of water. He slipped and almost fell off the tower. He hung there for a few minutes getting soaked, getting cold. He called out to his companions, but they were all gone.
It was then he noticed a small opening. Because of the angle of the roof and the fact that it was at the back of the playground’s perimeter, he had not seen before, that perhaps no one had seen. Inside was a sort of attic space. He crawled in through the little hole—barely squeezing through, hearing something snap on the way inside—and sat there in the dark chamber.
It hurt him to breathe. He must have broken something coming inside. But he had a view of the woods, the trees swaying, lashed with rain. He fell asleep. He woke the next morning and heard the children below him, sliding down the slide. He tried to call out, but his voice had gone. He felt feverish. He needed rest.
Many recesses passed in this way. He heard the children and watched the trees. He heard the noon aide’s silver whistle. A Moon Castle, he thought. I never imagined I’d end up in such a grand place.
For a long time, nobody dared climb that high again, until one day Jenny Z., the smallest girl in fifth grade, did it on a dare. When the aide wasn’t watching, she went out over the side of the tower and pulled herself up onto the roof. She found the little opening that no one else had seen and looked inside. She looked for a long time. She climbed back down and never told anyone what she saw.
Nick Story is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. His fiction has appeared in The Indiana Review, The Common, and Monkey Bicycle. You can find him on his website.
Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels