The Lost Boy's Playground

Substack Exclusive Story

The night I met the boy I was riding. 

Late-night bike rides around my neighborhood helped to clear my head. They were peaceful. They let me think. And during particularly stressful times such as squabbles with the family or cramming sessions on exam weeks, they were the only things that got me through. 

It was amazing how different the neighborhood looked under a veil of darkness. It turned dull streets into avenues of mystery, and everyday landscapes into the unrecognizable. 

These bike rides also brought me back to much simpler times, to days wound up in adventure, where your biggest worry was getting caught out in the rain or your mother calling you in for supper.

Lately, it felt like I was riding every night. Longer and longer, further and further. 

The roads were my own—just the cool breeze and the stars, the whizzing of each pawl pushed up tight against the ratchets of the spinning wheels, the clicking of the shifting gears, the pressure of the padded seat against my ass. 

Everything turned simple. 

Just ride. 

And as life paused briefly, for a moment, it finally let me think.

It had been a particularly insufferable summer. Fires ravaged the little patches of forests that we had left. Senior citizens were dying in their homes. Politicians were shuffling around money in order to provide aid. It wasn’t safe unless you had a working AC unit.

There was more than enough fodder to ponder on these long rides.

One night I couldn’t sleep. I took my bike out and passed by a school in a gentrified area of a neighboring suburb. It was a brick building in disrepair, nothing to write home about. But the neighboring houses were an eclectic mix of young and old—falling apart homes and spectacular new builds. It was one of my favorite routes to take.

I coasted through the intersection and something stole my attention.

Wait. 

Dust swirled in the air, the wheels skidding in a dangerous fishtail. I instantly regretted my decision to pump the brakes. I felt the weightless feeling of losing control. Digging my heels into the asphalt, I narrowly caught my balance and avoided a nasty faceplant. 

In the middle of the road, I squinted through the chain link fence. My heart was racing.

Why is the merry-go-round spinning?

Sure enough, the chipped rainbow-painted bars were spinning in a circle. In the dim glow of the streetlamp, there was the blur of a boy.

“Hello?” I called out, wheeling the bike toward the fence. 

The boy kept spinning within the contraption, alone in the looming steel and plastic jungle. The empty slides, swings, and monkey bars stood high and mystical in the shadows. All that fun for himself. 

I paused. It didn't feel right leaving him there. I searched the fence line and wheeled my bike to the edge of the road. I walked through the opening and into the pit, gravel crunching with every step. I stopped and hovered around the spinning structure. 

“Hey, buddy.”

The boy slowed his speed, but the carousel kept rotating. I reckoned he was maybe five given his attire: a tight mickey mouse t-shirt, jeans with knee patches crudely sewn in, and a pair of velcro sneakers. 

“Hi,” the boy responded, softly. There was a gap in the upper row of his teeth where his adult teeth had yet to fill in.

“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” 

The boy ignored my question, instead proceeding to dig his feet deeper into the gravel, forcing the carousel to a stop. 

“Where are your parents?” I prodded

His head hung low as he spoke, “My mum’s coming.” He stared into the hole he had dug with his tiny feet. “We’re new here.” Little waterfalls of gravel collapsed into the mini ditch, sliding down into the opening, his dusty shoes continuing their lackadaisical digging. 

“Well, I can’t leave you out here until she comes back.”

He looked up at me with tender eyes. “Please, can I keep playing?”

“Of course,” I replied. The boy’s eyes lit up like I had brought him his favorite toy. He rose and sprinted to the monkey bars. “Watch! Look how many I can do!”

So I watched him. The boy had an endless amount of energy as he swung from one bar to the next like a tiny, hairless primate. He skipped across the playground with unadulterated innocence; it was the type of freedom and joy only a child could experience. He launched down the slide a couple of times. Often, I caught him sneaking a glance at me.

“Look, mister! Look how fast I can go!”

The boy's excitement brought a grin across my face. I could barely see him looping back along the periphery, climbing up the purple ramp and stepping stone bridge toward the top of the spiral slide. 

“Look at me! Look at me!”

After a while, I caught myself yawning. In the haze of his innocent play, I had forgotten how late it was. There was a faint brush of orange beginning to creep through the dark sky. You could even feel the unforgiving summer heat already beginning to build.

And it was clear she wasn’t coming. 

I stood up from the merry-go-round. “Hey, kid,” I shouted. 

The boy looked up from the top of the slide.

“I’m just going to grab my phone. I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t leave!” he urged. 

“I’ll just be a second.”

When I got to the saddle bag strapped to my bicycle, the boy was already gone. 

***

A week later I saw the boy again. This time he was seated on the seesaw, a book clutched in his hand. I wheeled my bike through the entrance of the gate and parked it alongside the lonely park bench.

“Hey, buddy.”

“Hi,” he replaced, dejected.

“You’re out here again?”

He nodded timidly. 

“What’s your name, kid?” I asked. 

Nothing but the creaking of the seesaw.

I asked again. 

“Edgar,” the boy finally replied, barely looking up from his book. His mickey mouse shirt was beginning to collect dust, you could hardly decipher the cartoon character from a thick grey blob that had formed. He appeared pallid and sluggish this time. There were dry flakes of skin across his forearms and forehead like a snake shedding his skin. It looked incredibly painful. Underneath the crusty layer was a peculiar blue, like bruising I had never seen before. I figured he had been baking in the sun all week. But the smell was not to be ignored, neither were the dark rims under his eyes or his sweaty, greasy hair. 

“What’cha doing out here so late, again?” 

“Nothing.” 

I peeked over his shoulder and smiled at the coloring book he was doodling in. The boy held the crayon awkwardly–-wedged between his middle finger and his ring finger with his thumb sticking upward.

“You’re out of the lines,” I told him. 

The boy looked up. “Huh?”

“See the outlines of the frog?” I pointed at the picture of the cartoon amphibian floating on a lily pad in the middle of a lake. “You want to stay inside there.” I picked up one of his crayons from the box and offered it to Edgar. “Here. Like this. Preferably in green.” 

He smiled and proceeded to shade in the animal. The rest of the picture had been ruined with scattered scribbles of shapes, but that frog on the lily pad was perfect. 

“Thank you, Mister.”

I patted him on the shoulder. “The name’s Jack.” 

Meandering around the playground at a slow pace, I contemplated what to do next with the boy. 

The stars were out in a particularly bright display. As I completed my lap, I noted a single light-up shoe cast to the periphery of the gravel pit, a jacket strung across one of the metal bridges. Lost artifacts of prior children. Back at the seesaw, I smiled at Edgar and took the seat opposite of him. He smiled, slowly lifting into the air from my weight. He laughed, tossing the book to the ground. I cheated and stood up a bit as we began the trade-off, the seesaw bobbing up and down. 

Some time passed before I broached the subject again:

“You know, Edgar, growing up I was a latchkey kid myself. You might not know what that means, but it means Mom and Dad weren’t around a lot.”

He pursed his lips, remaining silent as he rose and fell and rose and fell.

“Anyways…I’m just saying that to tell you that I can relate.”

The boy’s eyes flashed as if he were about to speak, but it was a fleeting moment and his quiet demeanor returned. 

“Have you run away or something?” I paused, keeping the seesaw stagnant. “I just need to know that you are okay…or I'm going to have to call someone who can help.”

“I’m okay,” he muttered.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “I’m just trying to have a little fun before I have to go. Mom is coming. Very soon.”

I sighed. 

The optics weren’t the greatest—a teenage boy in the dead of night playing with a preschooler. What if he got hurt? Or even worse… And if there were cameras somewhere, how would that look?

“Uh, huh,” I grunted. “Well, why don’t we go and get her? Me and you.”

The boy took a heavy, annoyed breath like he had just been sent to his room. “She’s over there.” His finger was pointed high and aimlessly off into the distance, in the direction of the schoolyard. There was nothing but darkness for an uncomfortably long stretch.

“I guess it was fun while it lasted.” He held out his hand, “Thanks for playing with me, Mister Jack.” 

Puzzled, I shook the boy's hand. His palm felt as coarse as sandpaper.

“Edgar?”

The boy fled, bits of gravel kicking up in the air. He playfully hopped over the wooden barrier and into the black field, giggling as the cloak of darkness swallowed him up.

***

“Edgar!” I yelled.

 I cautiously stepped toward the edge of the playground. The tiny beacon of light from my phone had a pitiful visibility range, but even as I slowly approached the grass, I knew that he was gone. There was too much silence. Too much black.  Still, I stumbled into the open field, flinching as the crickets hopped around. They clicked their wings together and fluttered away with an uncomfortable amount of buzzing. 

There was nowhere for him to hide, but still, he had vanished.

***

The next week it poured and poured. It was a much-needed break from the heat, but the severity of the rain quickly outwore its welcome. Flooding crippled the city, hydroplaning vehicles smashed into others, capsized cars and trucks and vans floated across poorly draining freeways and basements flooded. 

The gloomy grey skies dampened my enthusiasm for little else other than playing video games on the sofa. It kept me cooped up inside with my thoughts. And that wasn’t a good thing. 

I decided to go out and fight the elements. A short ride to clear my head. I was sick of listening to the drone of the evening news, there didn’t look like there was an end in sight. 

The rain pelted down in heavy sheets. Cracks of lightning and thunderous booms. My waterproof gear did its best to keep me protected, but the steady flow of water eventually crept in. No one in their right mind would’ve been caught dead in these conditions. But I rode slow, visibility hampered by a hazy veil of fog and the torrential downpour. 

The cool air worked its wonders. I felt fresh. Free.

And after an hour or so, I found myself pedaling through the intersection across from the school. I sped up to get to the playground.

The boy wasn’t there, but neither was much of the playground. The plastic slides had been warped, melted into thin, dangling strings of color like thinly stretched bubblegum. The metal pitched roofs, the swing sets, and the monkey bars, were all twisted and covered in soot, black charred remains of the precious play area.

I hopped off my bike and passed through the gate to examine the scene. The pit had collected a lot of water, and articles of clothing floated in the lake. Still, you could see the banks of the gravel pushed into waves of patterns, mounds of rocks formed into peculiar shapes that felt both foreign and familiar. They stretched across the full length of the water-logged playground.

In the faint glow of the streetlamp, I glimpsed something tucked underneath the slightly overhanging wooden barrier. It was damp but otherwise legible. I flipped through the pages of the partially colored animals, landing on the one we had colored together. The frog that was perfectly filled with green. But this time, on the edge of the lake, there was a note scribbled in black crayon:

Thanks for playing with me, Mister Jack. 

I stepped out of the water and into the field. The beam from my cellphone shook as it revealed trails of the tiny rocks circling the marshy grassland. I squished my rain boots across the darkness, astonished by the intricate polygons.

My mother finally found me.

Lightning flashed off in the distance, the onslaught of rain continuing its violent barrage. But in the night sky, amidst the ominous clouds and all-encompassing black, I swore I saw something dazzle above. There was a wavy effect in the sky, like cooking oil spread across a skillet. And in a blink, another sparkle and the residue-like effect disappeared.   

Me and my family, we will come for you before it’s all over.

Out of the darkness, I made it back to the ruins of the playground. I saw the items floating away like debris from a sunken ship: the dirtied mickey mouse shirt, the tattered blue jeans, the velcro sneakers. 

Your buddy,

 Edgar.