Upside-Down Forever

Happy Birthday Frannie, our lil' Libra. Your fifth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your birthday is the chance for Aunts & Uncles to see all the Important Things happening to you.

I.T. #1: You keep grow exponentially; no longer tugging the hem of Daddy's corduroy pants but rather the leather of his disintegrating belt. You lean up against the cupboard where you routinely swipe Oatmeal Crème Pies and Mommy draws a doodle write above your head. This is the highest doodle yet. Daddy remarks 9-24-93 you could wrestle 5-22-92 you to the ground and steal her juice.

I.T. #2: Your hair-dangerous shiny spirals of blond restrained by two little pink bows. Whereas Dolly has crunchy, animal hair you have sand-like leiotrichous hair only mussed by ill-frequent tussles. When there are no toys in the vicinity, it is what you play with.

I.T. #3: Your voice moves between octaves without warning, which can be ear-splitting if inside-voice is not being used but is adorable otherwise. M & D talk to you frequently-not so much to listen to what you have to say but rather to hear your helium-toned butchering of the English language. Your rendition of The Bare Necessities caused Mommy's nose to twist nearly 45 degrees.

I.T. #4: And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: busy and distant, full of twisted metal and white knuckles, colors and shapes (you'll learn these); and you often awake through fluttering lids or an outside-voice shriek. Streetlights though your window blinds crack into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling and forge and endless duel with your Bunky night-light.

Your party is tonight. This afternoon, on your birthday, you must go to school, government orders.

Around the perimeter of this old public school on the western edge of Oregon is a Cyclone fence the color of pewter, decorated with a bright tangle of locked bicycles. Beyond this a hot black parking lot full of white lines and glimmering cars. A dull field of dry grass and hard weeds, old dandelions' downy heads exploding and snowing up in a rising wind. And past all this, reddened by a round slow September sun, are trees, jagged, their tops' sharp angles darkening into definition against a deep red tired light. The clouds are taking of color by the rim of the sky, 78% of the sky is a hardened blue.

Happy Birthday. It is a big day, big as the whole western sky. You thought it over in class while the rest of the class was transfixed by 's Marmoset puppet. They will be coming back soon. Climb up and do the thing.

Shake off the sand. You're baked by the sun, loose and soft, tenderized, pads of fingers covered in the ash of recesses past. The mist of the end of summer dew is in your eyes; it breaks light into gentle color. Knock your head with the heel of your hand. One side has a flabby echo. Play with your hair. You can hear harder laughter, closer shouts, much movement.

The playground is crowded for this late. Here are your-size children, hairy animals. Disproportionate boys, all necks and legs, vaguely birdlike. Here are toddlers moving tentatively on stick legs, feeling at the sand, every grain at once.

And girl-women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin bright-brown, carrying mysterious weights, shorts riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt in light into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.

The playground is a system of movement. Here now there are: marbles, sand fights, slide congestion, slapslap, chicken , Cops and Robbers, high swinging, tag (Blumberg It, halfway to tears, too long to be It, the game teetering on the edge of cruelty, not your business to save). Two little bright-white boys caped in dirt are making a crater in the sand until the king stops them dead with a squeaky shout. The king is brown as a tree, blond hair in waves, his head in a cardboard crown, his nose a white triangle of cream. A girl has an arm around a leg of his little throne. He's bored.

Go past , who is sunning and reading, not looking up. Forget your shoes. You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. Go right by, toward the west of the great iron tower of dirty yellow. A set of monkey bars protrudes from the side of the tower like a tongue. The playground is rough and hot against your bleached feet. Each of your footprints is thinner and fainter. Each shrinks entirely behind you on the hot surface and disappears.

The sand underneath the monkey bars is pristine, save for the footprints of a few fallers. The bars are entirely its own thing, set off from convulsive ballet of heads and arms. The bars are blue as energy, empty space perfectly square, flanked by grass and rough hot deck and the bent late shadow of the tower. It's disturbingly quiet here. A long line of girls and girl-women wait their turn.

There is a rhythm to it. Like breathing. Like a machine. The line for the monkey bars curves slightly back from the ladder's base. One by one, spaced by the beat of hearts, they grab the scorching metal. And they pause, each exactly the same tiny heartbeat pause. And their legs take them to the end, where they all give the same sort of stomping hop, arms curving out as if to describe something circular, total; they reach safely and head to the back of the line.

It's a swooping machine, lines of stuttered movement in sweet late shadows. You stand transfixed as each girl effortlessly makes her way across. It is a machine that moves only forward. The sand heals itself.

You decide this needs to be thought about. It may, after all, be all right to do something scary without thinking, but not when the scariness is the not thinking itself. Not when not thinking turns out to be wrong. At some point the wrongnesses have piled up blind: pretend-boredom, sweaty palms, space cut into runged parts that melt together only in a disappearance that takes time.

You are in line. Look around. Look bored. Few talk in the line. Everyone seems by herself. Most look at the bars, look bored. You have crossed arms, chilled by a late dry rising wind on the constellations of sand beads that cover your backs and shoulders. It seems impossible that everybody could really be this bored. Beside you is the edge of the towers' shadow. The system of shadow is huge, long, off to the side.

Almost everyone in line for the board watches the leader. Older boys watch older girls' exposed navels during the crossing. The good ones move across like pendulums in liquid, an uncrackable code. The girls' legs make you think of deer. Look bored.

Look across. You can see so well. Ms. Finster is in her lawn chair in a jumpsuit the sad near-pink color of bad candy, reading, squinting, her face tilted up to get light on her cheeks. She hasn't looked up in quite a while. She sips something sweet out of a bright can. Big stomach like the hint of a hump of a whale, skin oiled and soaked red-brown with too much sun. Bees hang motionless in a sweet blur.

At some point there has gotten to be more line behind you than in front of you. Now no one in front except one. The girl-woman right before you nearly finished but fell a few feet short and raised a cloud of dust. The girl behind you, quite possibly cruel, notices your stature and gives you a boost so you can grab the rungs.

The rungs are very thin. It's unexpected. Thin round iron rungs laced in Safe-T felt. You taste metal from the smell of iron in shadow. Each rung presses into the pads of your hands and dents them. The dents feel deep and they hurt. You feel heavy. Its like you might not hold on. And of course it looked like shorter from far away. You are not stupid.

Hanging motionless, up in the open, are your hands shaking or is it the machine? The path turns out to be long. As long as the time you stand there. Time slows. It thickens around you as your heart gets more and more beats out of every second, every movement in the system of sand below (which your brain has just convinced you will swallow you whole if you fall). You reach for the nearest rung with one hand while keeping your weak hand on the current rung. Motion. Hold on tight. Noise is loudest here. A cool dank whiff of the teenage boys playing Chicken on the balance beam. Grab the iron bars tight and twist and look down behind you and you can see people expressing nothing.

There's wind. It's windier the further you get. The wind is thin; through the shadow it's cold on your skin. The wind makes a thin whistle in your ears. Four more rungs to the end. The rungs hurt your hands. They are thin and let you know just how much you weigh. You have real weight on the bars. The ground wants you back. You do a maneuver that would give Mommy an aneurysm: you summon enough strength to get your legs over the top of the bars and release your grip. You are hanging upside-down, girl.

No time is passing outside you at all. It is amazing. The late ballet around you is slow motion, the overbroad movements of mimes in blue jelly. If you wanted you could really stay here forever, vibrating inside so fast you float motionless in time, like a bee over something sweet.

Where you are now is still and quiet. wind laughing shouting crying not here. No time and no real sound but your blood squeaking in your head.

Upside-down means sight and smell. The smells are intimate, newly clear. You smell peanut butter. (Colored) Chalk dust. A thin cruel hint of very dark Pepsi in a paper cup. And the special smell of tons of sweat coming off tons of skin, rising like steam off a new bath. Animal heat. From upside-down it is more real than anything.

Look at it. You can see the whole complicated thing, blue and white and brown and green. Everybody. This is what people call a view. You see now. You knew from right-side-up no one could really tell.

She says it behind you, her eyes on your eyes, your pigtails bobbing like pig tails, Hey kid. They want to know. Do your plans up here involve the whole day or what exactly is the story. Hey kid are you okay.

There's been time this whole time. You can't kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

Hey kid she says Hey kid are you okay.

No more time for thinking. Now that there is time you don't have time.

Hey.

Slowly now, out across everything, there's a watching that spreads like hit water's rings. Your mother looks to the sandbox where you should be, then makes a visor of her hand. Ms. Finster stirs and jiggles, looks up. The king looks down, the girl around his throne looks up.

Right-side-up is noise, fear, pain, where you used to be; the line is solid and has no reverse gear; and the sand, of course, is only soft when you're standing on it.

Look down. Now the shadows move, full of hard coins of light. The coins crack into new moons, long shards of light from the hearts of sad stars. Soft is just a kind of hard. A kind of blind. You have been taken off guard. Happy Birthday. Hey kid.

Disappear into a sea of time. Height is not the problem. It all changes when you get back down. When you hit, with your weight.

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

The lie is that it's one or the other. The floating bee is moving faster than it can think. The sweetness drives it crazy.

Upside-down eyes can cross blind into a cloud-blotched sky, punctured light emptying behind sharp stone that is forever. That is forever. Disappear & Return.

HONEY!