Victor Lavalle - Lucretia and the Kroons

“Playground of Lost Children,” she whispered.

She didn’t want to go in, but what choice did she have?

After five steps it was as if the rest of the park, the rest of the world, had been shut out. No sounds carried over. She looked around. Even the Kroons, their barking, was gone. She couldn’t see them, either. They hadn’t been that far behind her. So where were they? Nowhere. The faint breeze she’d seen brushing the tops of the grass, had felt against her skin, had disappeared. The air here was completely still. Even the sky seemed to be shut off from her now. She could still see the overcast grayness, saw a spark of lightning over the meadow, but she never heard the crack of thunder that should’ve followed. A moment after that she saw rain, faint droplets, falling in the distance, a rain shower throughout the park. But not here. Everywhere but here. Not a drop fell on the playground.

It was so quiet, in fact, that she heard her own footsteps on the concrete. And when she reached the padded play area she could hear the plastic wheeze beneath her. There wasn’t anything but some fencing separating this area from the rest of the park, but it was as if the playground’s fences were locking the world out, but maybe also locking Loochie in.

Loochie walked through the padded playground and just before she reached a row of swings she came across a child’s bike. It was upright. Made for a kid younger than her. Red, with rainbow tassels coming out of each end of the handlebars. It had one training wheel attached, on the left side. The right one was missing.

She stepped around the bike and toward the baby swings. There were four of them, in a row — black plastic. They were closed off inside a low set of black gates. From here she could see there was something sitting inside one of the swings. She opened the gate and the metal whined, making Loochie stiffen with fear that the Kroons would hear the noise. She stood there, the top of the gate in her right hand, and it took almost a minute before she could breathe normally again. Before she could walk.

She walked to the third swing in the row. There, tilted at an angle in the swing seat, was a toy school bus. She picked it up and when she did the bus’s little lights flashed and the toy rumbled out the sounds of an engine chugging. She balanced it on her open palm.

Loochie walked away from the swings still carrying the bus. As she moved to the next part of the playground, a big blue jungle gym with two yellow slides, she found more children’s toys, lying here and there. She stepped over two baseball bats and three small gloves. She found a length of jump rope in a heap. There were Frisbees and bright rubber balls, soccer balls and even tennis rackets. But no kids.

She passed under a silver awning, like a metallic tent top, that threw shade down on a portion of the playground. She found a Razor scooter there, still standing. She didn’t want to even touch it. Where had all these kids gone? As she passed the scooter she dropped the yellow bus. She hadn’t even realized she was still holding it. It fell on its side and its headlights flashed. The engine chugged, but Loochie wasn’t listening.

She stepped out from the awning. She just wanted to sit down. Where were all these kids? Were they dead? All of them? She felt — what? — weighed down by the thought, by the reality. Maybe children just die . They do. Sometimes. Loochie sat cross-legged and felt like she was going to melt. She covered her face with two hands. Her eyes burned as she began to cry.

She imagined Sunny, but not just Sunny, maybe all the kids who’d owned these toys, burned alive by the Kroons of apartment 6D. A place that was no apartment at all, but something else. Was it hell? Nobody had ever explained to her where hell was. People said it was underground, but how far down? She’d been riding the subways her whole life and she’d never seen a pit of fire filled with burning souls anywhere on the 7 line. So why couldn’t hell be located in a sixth-floor apartment in Flushing, Queens? What if she’d gone looking to rescue her best friend and got herself trapped in hell instead? And what if she never escaped? Who would take care of her mother? Would Loochie just die here? Starve to death? She didn’t even have a toy to leave behind. Eventually her body would wither away and there’d only be her bones.

But there weren’t any other bones here.

Plenty of toys, but no bones.

It was this realization that reenergized Loochie. If these kids had just died here there’d be bodies all over the place. There’d be something. She’d seen ashes fall from the tip of that first Chinese cigarette she smoked. Wouldn’t bodies at least leave ashes, too? But there were none. Now Loochie imagined that all these kids, one for each toy, dozens of them, were huddled away somewhere. Together. And that sounded a lot better than being alone.

Loochie stood again. She located the Unisphere on the landscape. It loomed larger than it had before. Maybe a hundred yards away now. She walked to the edge of the playground and strolled along the fence line. She didn’t want to go back out the gates she’d walked through. Maybe the Kroons couldn’t come into the playground any more than the wind or the rain, but they could be waiting right on the other side of those gates. In the real world this playground had two entrances. Maybe this one did, too. She’d walk along the fence line until she found the other one and hope none of the Kroons was waiting there. She put out one hand and ran it along the fence as she walked. The tips of her fingers felt slightly numb, in a good way, as she made sure to brush every pole she walked past for good luck.

Because she was concentrating so hard on finding the other exit she didn’t immediately notice the sound of thunder rolling toward the playground. But as the sound got louder, Loochie looked up. The rain had already stopped throughout the rest of the park though the skies remained as gray as before. Loochie tried to track the clouds. She missed one fence post then another as she moved. Loochie saw only one cloud in the distance. It was enormous. That deep gray that signals a serious downpour is coming. The cloud glided across the closer meadow but it looked like the wind would carry it elsewhere.

But then the cloud shifted. She watched it happen and couldn’t quite understand what she was seeing. It wasn’t like when wind directions change and a cloud moving east begins to slowly move northeast. No. As Loochie watched the great dark cloud seemed to bend . There was no way of mistaking the movement. The cloud turned.

It steered toward the playground.

Toward her.

And once it changed direction it seemed to increase speed. Moving so quickly that Loochie barely stumbled back five or six steps before she could understand what that noise in the sky really was. Not a thunderclap but the beating of wings. Like she’d heard when she passed that lopsided door in the hallway of 6D. Hundreds of wings. Maybe thousands. She’d passed the room and felt lucky she didn’t have to know what was causing the sound. But now she could see.

A cloud of rats. No, that’s not quite right. A flock of rats. The worst of the New York City varieties. The kind that plague subway tunnels and platforms. The kind that live in building basements, in the deepest cracks, and come out late at night to gnash through heavy-duty plastic bags of trash left on the streets for pickup. These were the big, bulky rats. Their fur was as gray as ashes, and their long thin tails as pink as torn flesh. She could already see their small, black, expressionless eyes. How many pairs? Too many to count. In every way they were familiar to her, every way except one: These things had wings.