All the trees in the park had fallen down. It was a storm. I couldn’t remember the storm. It must have been significant. All the trees were fallen down. Most had been roughly cut, pushed into piles, and surrounded by yellow tape. The air smelled of a fresh kind of pale and wet death. My daughter asked if she could take her shoes off to play in the sand at the playground. I said no, but didn’t know why, felt ridiculous, then said yes. My son watched as a woman changed her baby’s diaper on a wooden picnic table covered in moss. The woman (I say woman but she looked more like a girl, like she was fifteen or sixteen) kept telling her friend the wipes she was using had been recalled, that she was worried they were making her baby break out. Her friend said, Shit, bitch, babies asses are just red like that.

A boy with braids kept hitting my son, in a sort of kind and fraternal way, which served to both confuse and liberate my son. The boy’s Champion brand hoodie matched his Champion brand shorts. He wore Paw Patrol socks and no shoes. They each demonstrated to the other various techniques for sliding down the playground’s fireman’s pole. I was relieved to see them getting along like that. Last fall in the park a little girl stabbed another little girl in the neck with a piece of glass. Two summers ago a man raped a boy in a port-a-potty. You have to believe that people are good, I think, somehow. Guilty, but good.

The woman changing the diaper began an exchange with a man who’d jumped off a swing and came and held the woman around the waist as she finished taping on the baby’s diaper. His T-shirt said Juice WRLD. The fuck you want? she said. Chill, bitch, he said. The fuck you want? Chill, bitch. The fuck you want? Chill, bitch. The fuck you want chill bitch. My children stared. My son was now wearing the boy’s hat. A holographic sticker glinted beneath the flat brim. Otherwise there were clouds. Tall passing clouds. Clouds bulging sick with tumors. Clouds casting shadows of temporary grief. White and gray clouds with invisible edges.

My wife didn’t make it to the park because she had a date. We’d somehow ended up in a semi-open marriage, what progressive people were calling polyamory, a deceptively safe and sterile word, which is to say we got to fuck other people if we wanted to, which probably meant we were no longer in love, or just didn’t care, or did care, and desperately wanted happiness for each other, but had no idea how to bestow said happiness, resorting then by a kind of default to cheap and selfish, fashionable and desperate, modern means of feeling loved, satisfied, sated, whole, wanted for a minute, unsuffering for a spell. She said they were going for a walk around the lake. She said he was bringing heroin, but only to smoke. I may not be back until tomorrow, she said. She likes hooking up with semi-functioning junkies because they let her fuck them in the ass with her strap-on. Not all guys like that. I’d tried to like it, but didn’t—I was old-fashioned at heart.

A mother in a short dress with a thousand tiny yellow roses printed all over it followed her toddler through the playground. The toddler just kind of waddled up to everyone and stood there staring at them, her mouth shiny and curious with spit. The mother kept instructing: Say, Good day, Charlotte. Charlotte, say, Good day. It was all either of them could say, and Charlotte couldn’t yet form the sounds. The mother in the dress with the tiny yellow roses printed all over it pushed her prayer-folded hands into her crotch as she leaned down into her daughter’s being. The top of her dress was conservatively cut, but the way she was bent at her waist allowed a peek into the shallow rift between her breasts, where there appeared to be freckles either fading away or just beginning, and beads of emergent sweat. My wife told me when we’d first started fucking other people, together and not together, that she wanted to watch a school teacher-type with small tits squat over my prostate body and piss all over me. I said, well, sure, if you can find someone, banking on the fact that she probably couldn’t. But maybe. Probably, actually—there were apps, and all kinds of interesting people out there.

The people in the park faced off with Charlotte were not amused. They did not find her existence miraculous or even very cute. Everyone, it seemed, was inured to the aura of innocence, if in fact she was innocent, which is debatable. The young mother who was so concerned about the recalled wipes actually turned away from Charlotte, swung her feet out from underneath the picnic table covered in moss and stared across the street at a five-story apartment building replete with reflective windows. The sun was behind a cloud, rendering the reflective windows somewhat impotent. All you could see in the windows was a warped park scene, the one we were in, and the sky and clouds slicing apart on the edges of window panes. A car in a parking spot in front of the apartment building was one of those art cars, its exterior sides covered in manifold sea shells, the hood and the top of the car and the trunk, the flat surfaces, sandy and dimensional with driftwood.

I’d lost sight of my son, but thought I could hear him commiserating with his new friend in the plastic enclosure at the top of the slide. My daughter’s feet were sparkling with sand. She was walking away from the people on the moss-covered bench, something like a stick in her hand, looking like some kind of righteous thief. The friend of the woman with the child, the woman who worried about product recalls, stood and pointed at my daughter. Girl, bring that shit back, she said. Bring that shit back, girl. I looked closer to discover my daughter had absconded with a freshly rolled blunt. She stopped, hung her head in shame and embarrassment. Her back was to her protestors. I didn’t get up, just said, May, May, give that back. Give it back. She looked at me, disappointed. Give it back. She shook her head. Give it back. She pushed out her lower lip. Give it back. She scowled at me. Give it back. She stomped her feet. Give it back. She made an indignant sound. Give it back. She turned around, lifted up her head and chin, and floated back to the people at the moss covered table, unashamed, unapologetic, something in her shoulders and presence haughty and strong, inherited. May handed the woman the blunt, turned around, and walked back to a balance beam spanning a length of sand, traversing it successfully with her hands out for balance. Y’all see that shit, the woman said.

The woman in the dress with the yellow flowers all over it continued after her child, finally making her way to me. The mother squatted down next to the child, Charlotte, who was pulling at the rubber toe of my shoe. I could see the bottom of the mother’s thighs, stretched and white, tiny dark brown moles, cratered with inchoate cellulite. I imagined piss gushing from her crotch, etching river valleys in the sand, flooding the playground, exiling us all to higher ground.

Behind me was the county medical center, a monstrous building constructed in various stages over the last thirty or so years—a multitude of styles and colors and materials, brutal, baroque, Scandinavian, cedar and matte blue and glass. The harsh beating sound of a helicopter came closer and closer. I turned around to see it above the skyline, coming right at us. The thwapping sound grew. The quiet between beats shorter and shorter. It was close enough to drown out anything like conversation or comedy or complaints on the playground. As the helicopter landed on the pad on the rooftop of the hospital, its noise reached an apotheosis. I could read the lips of the mother with the yellow roses all over her dress—she was still directing her daughter to say Good day, to me now, but I couldn’t hear, over the blades of the helicopter, the mother or the child, or my children, or anyone else in the park. A very delayed gust of wind, from the helicopter touching down, I think, if that’s possible, swept over the playground, lifting up sand, reviving the flaccid leaves of the trees that had fallen in the storm, rattling all the taut yellow caution tape. White smoke from the presently lit blunt wrapped around the head of the mystical man wearing the Juice WRLD T-shirt, then disappeared. The helicopter pilot killed the engine. The blades slowed down, the chopping in perfect, measured descent. You know that sound, from movies, right? War movies? End-of-the-world movies? Cop movies in which the SWAT team is called in? If you haven’t heard it in real life? It sounds like this. 

This is the thing: I worry about my wife. I worry on one of these dates she’ll be raped or murdered or do some raping and murdering herself, and then I’ll have to droop through the rest of my life as a shamed widower, or I’ll have to help cover up her crimes. I’d help disappear the transgressions of anyone I love or think I love or am supposed to love. I would. Some people with their morality and sense of right and wrong will tell you they wouldn’t do such a thing, even for their children, they would air them out, their close ones and their crimes, in the service of justice and what is right and what is wrong in their calculus of such measures, but ok, whatever. I wouldn’t.

So this is what she says happened on the date with the man who brought some heroin to smoke. She told me this while she made me lick her pussy and asshole and scolded me every time I tried stroking my cock. (We were both on our knees and we’d turned on the lava lamp that’s on her side of the bed, a somewhat ironic lamp, but not entirely, if you want a sense of setting. Also, we’d turned off the ceiling fan because it makes her pussy dry out. So it was kind of airless and hot. Oh, and the bed was all gritty with sand from the previous day when we were too tired to shower after a long day at the beach at the lake in the far southern part of the city, not the lake she walked around with the heroin smoking guy, which is more centrally located). This is more or less what she said: he had tin foil, and a little bag of dope, and a lighter, and a pen he took apart to smoke through, a pink pen, a breast cancer awareness pen, I think? And the lighter had a fish on it, a bonefish or something, he told me, but I forget, maybe it was a barracuda. This was after we’d walked around the lake, which was a pretty average and boring walk around the lake. People seemed stuck out in the middle on their sailboats because the wind had died down to, like, nothing. Like, negative wind. We found a port-a-potty to smoke in, because there was nowhere else, it’s all so public there. It was a handicapped port-a-potty, so, big, and it was new, or just cleaned or something, so it wasn’t that disgusting. But still, right? Yeah, so we smoked and it got really hot in there, and I had this thought that we were like flowers in a greenhouse, the kind that don’t get bought in the spring during planting season and just kind of lurk all summer until they’re sold at a massive discount in August or September, when they’re almost dead, to some sad thrifty person who will only get to enjoy them for a very short while, and in their less than prime times of life. I didn’t tell him any of this, though, he was pretty much a stranger. He said he worked as an economist at Xcel Energy but wasn’t even really sure what he did anymore, some kind of forecasting, but he was always wrong, but he never got fired, because it never really mattered that he was wrong about things, because they always found a way to adjust, to price spikes and oil dumps and wars and conflicts in commodity-rich regions, and anyway he was trying to franchise a weed cookie business called Baked Cookies, and he had a wife and a little girl and his mother had just died from breast cancer, which I guess explained the pink pen. I told him to pull down his pants and he did and I was like, fuck, this cock is huge, not long, but wide, in diameter, and I squatted down before him and took it into my mouth and it tasted good and clean but I took it out fairly quickly and said, Do you want me to fuck your ass? and he said, With what, and I said, My cock, and he said, You’re a man? and I said, No, my fake cock, and he said, Ok, yeah, maybe. Where is it? I said, In my purse, and he said, Let me see it, and I unzipped my bag and showed it to him, and he said, Ok. He seemed cool with the size, which isn’t very big, and so I strapped it on over my yoga pants and told him to turn around, and oh, my god, it was so hot in there, like we were trapped in hell, but a thrilling hell, a hell that maybe wasn’t so permanent, a thrilling temporary hell. And I fucked him while we were both standing up (I’d brought my organic coconut lube) and his hands were pressed against the walls of the port-a-potty and he had on one of those rubber wedding rings, and then he started groaning and moaning and someone knocked on the plastic door of our little plastic hell and said, When will you be done in there? When will you be done? When will you be done in there? When will you? Some old aggrieved lady, but kind of polite. He kept his hat on this whole time, a baseball cap, and his dirty blonde hair poked out of that hole in the back like a little boy’s. When will you be done in there? When?

When it’s just the four of us, sometimes, say we’re watching Gremlins or Gremlins 2 or old episodes of ALF and it’s cold in the basement and we’re all scrapping for blankets, or we’re all at the dirty bay window watching a chipmunk eat sunflower seeds from the bird feeder debating who would win in a cage fight, chipmunk or bluejay, or we’re walking around the block with our shirts off in the middle of another broiling summer, not my wife, but my daughter, because she’s little, has nothing yet to hide, and my son and me, and the sun is low in the sky and pulsing with its sleepy orange blood, and the police and ambulance cries are not for us, and never will be, everything seems like it will be sort of ok, forever, even when darkness falls, and the Little Brown Bats start swooping through the almost night, using their sonar to find and eat the bugs we’ve all been told are disappearing in great numbers because the way we live is destroying everything that ever was—and if only we had the will to change things, it would be possible to change things, if only we had the will—and one of the Little Brown Bats glides right over us, just over our heads, and all four of us see it and duck down, and my wife pulls both kids’ heads into her breasts, but by then the Little Brown Bat is already halfway down the block, flying as if it has a broken wing, but this is just the fractured way they fly, amputated and uneven, into the twilight, into the nearest suburb, into the future, into the ever-turning black of night, in aeturnum 

in aeturnum

in aeturnum