BY SHANNON PERRI
My daughter refused to stop crying until I gave her control over our direction. She was in the stroller while I was pushing it, running and walking in intervals as my Couch to 5K app instructed me. Her pale arm would zombie-rise as we neared a new crossroads, and after bulling forward through too many fits, I started asking her, “Are you wanting me to turn? Here?” Her skinny finger would then lazily point, left or right. She didn’t say many words, so I had to say them for her. “Ah, there.”
I was trying to exercise—ever since my daughter’s birth, two years before, my blood pressure had been steadily climbing—so I didn’t really notice that, before long, her route had led us to park I didn’t know. When we’d left our house, the sun was out, and a warm, Texas humidity had loitered in the air. Here, the humidity had elevated to assault, a smothering, pillowy fog. I found myself struggling to breathe.
My daughter did not care. Her once limp finger was now firm and aggressive, thrusting toward a nearby playground. The park also included a basketball court, a tiny cemetery of four, and an open grassy field that burst through the trees. No one else was present.
I’d stopped moving the stroller, and now my child furiously wanted out. The app barked at me, too. I was trying to refill my lungs, to read the names on the crumbling markers. But my offspring was thrashing and red, like a live boiling lobster, screaming as the straps of the stroller contained her fierce small body. I was tempted to walk away as I do while cooking shellfish.
I draped my headphones around my neck and released her. She darted toward the playground, ignoring the reasonable slides more suitable for her age, and instead bolted straight for the highest one, a yellow tubular slide that made me anxious because when I poked my head in its exit, the slide was angled in such a way where I couldn’t see through to the top.
I heard my daughter laugh and then yanked my head out of the tube. She’d scurried up the playground and now stood at the slide’s entrance, her skin glazed with a coat of mist.
“Wait for me,” I said, fumbling up the slippery bars of a neon orange ladder. Once at the summit, I noticed the yellow slide curved slightly. At its various joints, lips of plastic were gathered and bolted, like stapled excess skin.
“Mama.” My child reached for my hand and spun herself as hard as she could without severing our connection, nearly spraining my arm. Dizzy, she then swung into me for stabilization. Her golden hair, curled at its tips from the mugginess, stank of sweat and string cheese mixed with baby lavender shampoo.
“Is this what you wanted?”
She shrugged her shoulders, gazing at the mouth of the colossal tubular slide as if it were a portal to another world. The stroller appeared toy-sized from our heightened vantage. This was maybe the tallest slide at a playground I’d ever seen. The air felt cooler up here, chilly and damp. Despite my embrace, my daughter was shivering.
“Should we go home?” I asked. I needed to finish my run.
She shook her head no, her eyes still transfixed toward the yellow. As if a lake lurked inside, she dipped her toe in to assess its temperature. Her pink Velcro sandal came out soaking. Rainwater must’ve pooled. She stared at the opening nervously and then at me. Always me.
“Mama,” she said again, before spitting into her palm and wiping the gunk on my wind-shorts. She then somehow found a stick and began slashing it against my calves.
“Stop that,” I said, pinching my headphone wires between my fingers. “How about I give you a push?”
She giggled as she continued to beat my unshaven legs with an astonishing strength. I pinched harder.
“Do you want to slide down or not?”
She didn’t answer, just kept hitting me with the stick. Maybe the slide was too tall, or she didn’t like the uncertainty of where it would lead. Yet, she wasn’t toddling toward the stairs or other slides, and if I picked her up, she would scream.
I scanned the park. Besides a few crows and a red-and-white striped beach towel tucked under a bench, we were still alone, a rarity. Even during the week, most parks were packed. Perhaps it was the weather that kept others away. I tried to look up on my phone how far we’d drifted from home, but before I could type in our address, my child bit me.
“Ouch!” I cried, swatting at her face. She reared back as if she herself had been wounded. I stroked my tender thigh—she’d drawn blood. Her little arm lunged again for the stick, and that’s when I’d had it.
“It’s time,” I said.
She may be strong, but I was stronger. My daughter usually prefers to slide down feet first, but I couldn’t stand to see her face. I stole her stick and chunked it and then heaved her tiny body, belly-down, into the slick yellow passageway, holding onto her ankles as the rest of her dangled downward. She tried to turn around, her skinny fingers now scrambling, but the space was too tight. Though the puddled water splashed in my face, tasting of root, I refused to surrender.
“Mama,” she whimpered. “Mama!”
“There,” I said, letting go of her ankles and shoving the white bottoms of her pink sandals forward. Her body began to slip, and suddenly the air felt thin and crisp, as if I hadn’t scaled a playground, but instead a mountain. The haze was now clearing, the trees a rushing vibrant green. For a brief and glorious second, there was nothing to do but gulp the open sky.
I almost felt peace, except my daughter’s cries echoed through the canal, and I remembered my own cries as she barreled through my open cervix. I tried to listen for the birds, but then the faint commands of the app began to crackle through my headphones. I tugged them off my neck and dangled them through the playground bars.
As the breeze picked up, I dropped them. The wires moved strangely slow as they fell, like hair under water or dust in a headlight. Yet once the headphones gained speed and their jerking turned frantic, it hit me: yellow is the color of a warning.
I looked past the looped monkey bars, their handles shaped like nooses, to the cemetery. I couldn’t decipher their names, but I could see the date of death in big bold engravings—the same on all four. I made up stories. A fire, a flood, both. There lied a mother who didn’t forsake her children. Or was it that she couldn’t escape?
I tried to take in another sip of air, but the sudden wind nearly choked me. Again, I couldn’t breathe. In the distance, the basketball net swayed at the same soft tempo I used to sway my baby to sleep.
“Sweetie?” I called from the slide’s entrance. Her voice was now gone, the silence murderous. I studied the exit—no one was there. Same as when I gave birth, I tried to trust she’d come out where she was supposed to be. Yet my fingers grasped for the phantom of hers. I ached for her cheesy smell, the ping of my daughter’s body searching for the tower of mine. My daughter, the one that grew from the now slack gut of my center.
And so, I did what I had to do. I crouched down and army-crawled into the ribbed unknown. My forearms were soon drenched, but I pressed on until the crown of a metal screw shocked me. I tried to scoot back, try feet-first instead, but that wasn’t possible. The space was too constrictive. My heart battered against its cage.
I filled up my lungs—at least I could breathe in there—and exhaled. “Mama’s coming,” I called out, my voice vibrating around me. Then I made myself long and slid forward to find her.
Shannon Perri holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University and a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Texas. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in various newspapers and literary magazines, such as Sycamore Review, Texas Observer, Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, Joyland Magazine, PANK, Literary Orphans, The Ocotillo Review, and fields magazine. She lives in South Austin with her husband, son, and menagerie of pets.