The Park

No one is allowed into the park unless they’re wearing a designated costume that suffices regiment. Halloween has become an official holiday, one with regulations and subjected to jurisdiction. The sky is bleakly solacing. It is the kind of day that welcomes you inside, niched from the rain. I am probably snuggled up on the couch, watching tasteless films. If little girls get lost, there is no one to blame except their intrepid rash snooping curiosity; to learn from mistake is crucial—vital!
There are guards posted at the gated entrance of the park. They are also required to wear costumes. They wield giant poleaxes. The poleaxes are embroidered with precious metals and engravings; harlequin and bosomy. The guards wear masks that resemble kites made out of anthropoid skull. They remain motionless. I’ve always wondered how anyone could manage to stand so rigidly still, even with such rigorous standing-still training. It must be a prerequisite of fraternity alumni.
Inside the park, everyone is dancing. It is so cold out that they are all excessively grateful to be with one another. They feel as if they’re a part of something they have no control over, and therefore incontrovertibly bound. They tug on each other’s scarves effervescently. Some of them are artisans, others the romantics the artisans once were, standing snobbishly by the artificial snowmen. A little girl runs into the park, her legs screeching. She runs too quickly for the guards to obstruct her. She is not wearing a costume.
The moon arises. It’s grinning. All the dancers point up at it, making sure in one another’s eyes that it’s something to be unduly excited about. The romantics smile jarringly. They keep their hands in their pockets, then remove them, trying to find a more conceivable place to put them. I do not feel impelled to creep up behind them and murmur over there.
The little girl nimbly swerves around the dancers. She absconds into a deeper section of the park, the guards trailing behind her, tripping over themselves. When she has dissolved out of sight one of them motions the other to stop chasing her, perspiring pot-bellyingly and panting, rather dry heaving. The dancers slight her. A couple of teenagers without costumes on sneak in while the guards are busy chasing the girl. They lurk and machinate roguishly behind the trees.
The artisans are out of ideas! They struggle and resort to venery, prepensely reluctant.
The movie I’m watching is not distracting me. I hate watching films with other people because they somehow immediately become absorbed with them and I remain distracted, visceral; obsessive. There is nothing worse than watching films with women that have no interest in films.
The little girl, her nettled and willowy hair flapping behind her. It is lissome and umber; tiny mischievous branches unnoticed at the top of a tree. The trees in the park notice this. They admit her ingression. They feel guilt but are biologically predisposed to camouflage.
In the center of the park the dancers continue to mizzle, thawing into fog. They demonstrate their pedantry of amativeness, affecting participation in something they’d rather not. Even the romantics speak in demure tones, bewildered to hear them uttered by themselves. The teenagers fostered amidst the trees throw rocks at them to no avail. They are hyenas, hitting each other in the ribs, though one of them is dismayed. His face is becoming and dour.
I’ve lost trace of the little girl. I turn off the film I’m watching. I galumph into my room and snatch my car keys from the desk, smothered by a pile of unfinished essays. I lock the door to my apartment and tap my foot to encourage the elevator to arrive faster. It takes at least ten minutes and I think about returning to my apartment, or taking the stairs, but the problem with taking the stairs is that as soon as you give in the elevator glamorizes. I do not hold the elevator for one of my neighbors I hear leaving their apartment down the hall. In the lobby I ignore the doormen because they think I am ignorant.
I have trouble starting the car. I rummage for a case of CD’s from under the front passenger’s seat; a case I was once awarded at a youth-leadership intervention. I want to listen to something dismal, something eurhythmics would dance to in their sleep. Something I can’t understand the lyrics to. I put in a CD and the martyr’s voice crawls into my room through the window. I don’t listen to this kind of music.
The little girl, delving further into the park, has become frantic. She was at first frantic and exhilarated; now no one chases her, and she left no bed crumbs. I am going to save her. This is what I do. I watch tasteless films and save little girls. I will have to dispatch of the guards. I have done this many times exploiting those that do not wear costumes, who sneer and rationalize everything. They cannot afford costumes, or they truly believe there is a moral conflict in wearing them. The poleaxes the guards wield are trifling, anyway. I am in possession of an unlicensed firearm.
The darkness swarms down upon the girl. The trees try to defend her, but they are just aloof, enfeebled old men, drearily kicking up sand by the shore. The horses begin to wriggle themselves out of the ground, snorting grime and neighing agitatedly at having been evoked from their sepulchral hibernation. Their riders will skulk out from behind the trees correspondingly, lurking behind them like teenagers. They prey on the defenseless and critical.
I am famished, I am exhausted, and I am indefatigable. I’ve become this jaded ascetic, a hermit, wondering if there’s any more sense to it than just succumbing to impulsive perhaps even instinctive vice. I’d like to think I am not such an atrocious and loathsome being, and such I am perceived. Maybe their disfavored perception of me reinforces my ethical disposition towards the sense of dissociative existence, but I digress. There are no sociologists to brood in front of.

The girl cowers into the midriff of a sterile field. The sky pities her. Her toes have begun to tear through the front of her loafers, ensnarling in the weeds she scrambles through. The riders sprout up at a direly accelerative pace as she flees, their moldy and crumbled heads squirming through the less packed in patches of dirt. Some of them can’t break ground, relentlessly banging their heads against the topsoil, causing it to jounce and ripple. The girl trips on one of the emerging heads, gangly spattering it open, gathering herself together fervidly. She struggles to maintain balance, topsy-turvy, juggling her careening legs.
The horses, jawless and skeletal, magnificently thrust themselves aloft on their hind legs, apprehensive of their riders’ calls. Their legs are mangled and wobbly, their manes crusted with bog. The sockets where their eyes used to be are squelched with mud; the horses are blind without their riders, staggering like newborn calves and causing a discombobulated ruckus bumbling into one another.
The sky is a smothered by a psychedelic auburn fog; a lake of effulgent garnet light streaks through it, amoebic. A granite bridge plummets vertically into the center of the field, crashing uproariously in distrait, snapping back elastically like a cyanide envenomed spinal chord. It thrashes and writhes in despair, moaning so loudly that the girl and the riders are buffeted turbulently into the trees who in turn swat the riders and glom the girl, ensconcing her in their infirm interwoven branches.

I buy a pack of cigarettes for a gaggle of teenagers, glad to not take the advice that I don’t have to give. One of them is blaring Paris Hilton on his boom box, drawing the disgust of everyone in the area who doesn’t understand their fascination with paradoxical dissent; the others laugh, coaxing him on. I get back in the car. Driving away, I glimpse at the rearview mirror; the gas station is overtly there.
I am afflicted by a porous despair. Sometimes it feels as if life is too brittle to live. I was walking near the bridge overpass the other day, near one of the crosswalks, on the way home from McDonald’s. All of a sudden I had the inordinate urge to stampede headfirst into the midst of the highway. As soon as I began to feel this the friend that I was with could hardly flush his brow, seemingly embroiled by what I felt.
We started talking about the past, mostly teenage recreation with pills that had imprinted currency symbols imprinted onto them, and how they’ve evolved into our present addictions; hydromorphone, he mutters, distressed by his predicament. He gestures with his hands in strange ways while trying to get his mind off of things, as if wary of an oncoming storm. He tells me about a boy he knew who was afraid of the subway because he didn’t have enough control to stop himself from jumping out onto the tracks. My friend pauses. He says, “Remember?” pointing at the wall portion beneath the fence that sides the overpass. There’s graffiti—ours, from years ago. He chuckles to himself wistfully.
At home, I take a bath. I smoke. I light the unlit cigarettes with the end of the lit ones, ashing into the water. Now I am overwrought with racking, racking poignancy. I am ruminating impalpably over why we do the things we do, and why we feel impelled to stare at the moon as if it’s Sisyphus’s boulder while ruminating over such things. Perhaps safety from death is knowing how close it is—only keeping it so close, close enough. I’ll never forget sneaking into my friend’s mother’s medical cabinet, still in high school, and finding the emoticon “=P” printed onto one of the sides of the prescription bottles.

It’s unconscientiously dark, I can barely see the road ahead. A car billows in front of mine, rocking abominably in the wind. Have I forgotten how to get to the park, already? Has it been so long? I try to signal the car in front of mine to pull over so I can ask for directions, but the driver ignores me. The highway has become an agoraphobic’s exorbitant void. I’m headed in the direction of the drunk driver, presuming the wind is not that effusive.
There was a time when I had a costume. I’d change it diurnally; tacking on gaudy rococo buttons, or donning suit jackets that wedded koans referred to as blazers. I kept my costume in immaculate condition. I hung it up to dry. I hand-washed it compulsively.
Then one day I tripped, I lost balance trying to find it; I fumbled, irrevocably blemishing my costume with the soil I wouldn’t be surprised it must’ve once been comprised of. I bemuse someone might have pushed me, but at the time suspicion was an incomprehensible concept to me. I struggled to take my mask off, my body writhing lewdly while tousling out of the gown. Someone bassinetted me from the ground and whisked me away from the surrounding crowd, amassing as fast as someone pointing at nothing in the sky.
I was dumbstruck that I had no grace to fall from, and soon after I found the ground much more convenient, there being so many methods of clumsiness.
I stopped wearing my costume. I tossed it into the closet. I aged, and became confused with the similarities between the hyperrealistic and dreamlike states that impregnated me; finagling myself that I was insane to justify my microcosm of detached and automated unreality, in flinching trepidation of the depersonalization that loomed around every corner I crept past apprehensively sub rosa in my mind. I found solace in planting trees to save little girls that get lost in the park, and bridges. I built bridges out of granite so they wouldn’t burn down, except I didn’t cross them. Instead, I trained them, and used them as warding sentinels, capable of unleashing their subdued fury to save those in need.
And the illegible prescriptions, the medications, the (why orange?) bottles spooning on my desk, the pills in side gradually deteriorating due to humidity. I couldn’t understand how much I could trivialize my emotions by gaining temporary control over them. It jarred my sense of reality. I sat by the window, fuzzed and dreamily throbbing, admiring the angelic effect the fluorescent sunlight impressed upon my skin. Then I dawdled there sober for the same amount of time, trying to convince myself that I was relinquishing what I’d missed while drugged.
I enjoy being lost, it is comforting; it is the only circumstance in which I feel that I belong, permissibly a stranger to myself.
The girl is fine, for now.

But I am not lost for long, and when I know where I’m going and the time restrictions have been designated (she must only have another hour or so to live), I lose interest in my task and become restless. I change the song, or I change the channel, or I light a cigarette and watch the dancers on TV. Sometimes an old acquaintance will slip through and cause a fuss but they don’t stay long. I’m not hospitable, however, my aero-mattress is more comfortable than my own bed.
I entertain a hitchhiker off the side of the highway in hopes that she knows the direction to the park (she does).
“I was under the impression that you had feelings for me.”
I don’t respond.
“Why else would you pick me up off of the side of the road?”
I realize that responding logically will have an opposite effect. I proceed cautiously.
“I pitied you. You were standing there alone with your thumb in the air and I figured you’d either crawled out of the woods or someone stranded you on the side of the road.”
“No, actually, I’ve been waiting there. For you. I’ve been waiting there all night for you; I knew you would pass by. You always do.”
I don’t respond.
“I have been waiting for you for so long.”
“Why me?”
She reddens.
“Why you? Why you? Are you not even aware of the feelings that I have for you? Are you—”
I stop the car, keys in hand, austerely circle around the front and lug her out of the passenger’s seat.
I drive. She runs after the car, hysterical, wailing desperately, her arms tentacularly floundering. I assize her, shuffling in her bedcover dress. I stop the car. I hatch open the door to the passenger’s seat with the lethargic-inspired over-convenience of technology.
Now she has blessed me with a rehearsed soliloquy. It is heavily dithyrambic, and weighs the car down, the tires squealing against the frame.

The little girl ogles down below at the riders and their festering horses. They have began to girdle the trees, gawking and moaning like zombies. Are they not zombies? No, they are too dependent on the park for their survival. They have been planted and harvested by the owners of the park for their own maniacal scientific amusement; one giant leap for mankind: disproving its own existence. The zombie-riders sigh. To what end?
The little girl rescinds into the confine of the trees. She breathes in their leaves, and exhales them into the wind. The trees know they can only keep the zombie-riders at bay for so long without my aid. I am the ultimate reinforcement for reasons unknown to everyone but the proprietors of the park. The mere sight of me will cause the zombie-riders to sulk with terror. Sometimes I shoot a couple of them, to set a behavioral paradigm that is never conditioned..
“So this is what you do? You drive to the park and save children? And you do this every night. And you do this because—”
“I feel as if it is my duty because my father is one of the proprietors of the park and I am the only one with the power to repel the zombie-riders—a power granted to me by birth.”
No, I don’t say that. I say:
“Mhm.”
She scoffs. “I think you are just afraid of anybody being the victim but yourself.”

We pull in across the street from the entrance of the park. The guards are still there, brandishing their bec-de-corbins. There’s a crowd jeering and teeming into the street, hurling rubble and feculence over the park’s deployed barricades. I mosey around to the passenger’s side and take the hitchhiker out by the hand. She tiptoes out, daintily and unaffectedly ladylike. I’m running out of time; if the trees feel mortally threatened, they will release the girl and she will mangle her tenuous, rustic body against their gnarled roots. I assess the situation, surveying the guards and the crowd; the possible courses of action. I am too indecisive: I can execute the guards, but then the crowd will bedlam, condemning the dancers. I can attempt to bribe the guards; I have done this before, the chance of success variably inconsistent.
“Disheartened, are we?” She chimes in, impressed by her own friskiness. For the first time I notice how comely she is, her eager eyes, her chastely unkempt hair, her cheeks fond, downy.
“Whatever.”
“Hah.” She prances around me, clapping her hands together and suspending herself on top of me, exposing her acicular chest.
“I don’t like people that know me.”
This reply surprises her. She’s not used to men deferring conflict or emotionally candid. She seems the kind of woman who would enjoy the intensely debonair, vaguely poetic man of ultimatums and flagrant, improvised wisdom. A woman who finds that chauvinistic solemnity intriguing.
The guard scrutinizes me with a deadpan expression, anchored by his uniform and devoted to his devoir, extrinsically motivated . I do not want to confront him; he is merely doing his job. He must have a family to support; the crowd ostensibly insensate to this. The crowd will incriminate anything and anyone as a means to amass, or manifest insurrection without actualizing it.
She crosses her arms. “So what now?”
“Currently, the only viable option raises too many personal conflicts to consider.”
“Personal conflicts that are more important to you than saving a little girl?”
“I can’t save them all. I won’t always be able to save them all. There will come a time—”
“Excuses.” She gives me a look of ardent disapproval. “I expect more from you.”
“You’re not the only one.”
She distends her arms, curling her hands into fists, glaring at me admonishingly, failing to conceal her innate compassion. To surmount the guard’s hominine belvedere I’d have to revoke and adorn my costume; I’d have to retrieve it from my father’s house where it’s still disheveled on the closet floor. I don’t think anyone’s washed it since the day I forsook it.
I haven’t had the time to suffice repose. That acute over-awareness that occurs during an insomnious sunrise has riveted me. I wonder how my body handles the neglect I, attempts at relief, impose on it. Some of the crowd members burlesquely flip me the bird, their mouths shaped ovally.
I weed out a memento from my pocket that I had scrawled a list of songs on last night. The edges of it are soggy and damp, the scribble illegible. I glance over at the hitchhiker, avidly waiting on me. What institution has she escaped from?
And I? I vaguely recall being institutionalized when I was younger, though it must’ve been undoubtedly voluntary.
I signal her to get back inside the car with a pert gesture of my hand. Up above, the moon is still grinning wildly, nauseously sallow. The leaves flicker and swirl beside us, licking my legs smugly at having tapered the wind shield. I burned the inside of one my fingers last night pulling fish sticks out of the oven. It’s blain. I don’t care that much; there was a time that I would have thought such a burn would detract from my appearance. I once again recall being younger and getting compliments from people, that I was beautiful or handsome, and then I would constantly be terrified that I had to maintain that state, that I could dispossess it. I was envious of those that were forced to work at an early age and didn’t seem to care about their corporeal manifestation.
The hitchhiker, flitting nervously, raises her chin up while walking beside me. The crowd, a whole, swells and brays. I watch it from the confines of the car. It is compromised of self-proclaimed insurgents, always knowingly one step behind, all following each other and subsequently stagnant.
I start the car, relaxing as it vibrates and groans. The hitchhiker catches a glimpse of herself in the side mirror, noticeably against her own will. She settles her hands on her lap. She looks frightened, momentarily unhinged. I’ve always wondered what reflections the insane conceive in the mirror; probably no more distorted than the rest of us.
I back the car out of the park, tentatively undecided. I know that if I abdicate my duty the world I have miscreated will pursue and torment me. It will unwind during a long drive like this one, and it will impound me an undestined and deathless drive. Guilt is the only emotion capable of emancipating me from such temptations. And after awhile, these temptations become, to what I have obsessively and irrationally rationalized, impossibilities, or feckless whims. I constantly outgrow what I need, but I am grovelingly shackled to want.
I watch the dancers, kicking up their legs, spurred on by the spite of the on-looking crowd—or maybe they are incognizant, preoccupied with their gaudy and specious decadence; the personas they adopt and believably convey. A fretful depersonalization besets me: my eyes echo, my vision rings focuslessly. I am no longer in my mind, nor was I to begin with.
Back on the highway the hitchhiker has a sighing fit. The rush I had from acting irresponsibly earlier has faded, having stranded me serene and panic-stricken. I am starting to have a third-person awareness of my emotions. It’s as if they’re in a room next to me and I can manipulate them, tell them where to go, how to get there, whether to sit still or stand or recline inattentively and tumble down a flight of stairs with a landing comprised of an indeterminable element. I’m becoming soporific and somatically absent, progressively disoriented. I take my eyes off the road to glance at the hitchhiker. Should she take the wheel? Surely she would get us killed, swerve onto the wrong side of the highway and cruise headlong into oncoming traffic.
I don’t know who I’m saving. I should have.

The riders have given up. They sit on the ground with their legs crossed, their backs gruelingly hunched inwards. Their trusty rotting steeds have collapsed onto their haunches. Some of them struggle impotently to stand, neighing helplessly. The bridges have receded into the sky. The girl closes her eyes, holding onto herself with her knees against her chest, composed by trauma. She is wearing a light blue-berry waistcoat with sizable plastic buttons. She has a white and red ribbon slinking through her hair.
The riders, what more to do? They’ve tried, and now they can surrender fulfillingly. It was an almost adequate attempt, enough to convince themselves they really exerted their consummate aptitude. They pant and shake their heads at each other in camaraderie.


“You are a coward.”
“I am a coward?”
“It takes one to know one,” she snaps.
I’m no longer even paying attention to the road. The hitchhiker is delighted by her insouciant maternalism. She loves listening to her own voice, doing so gingerly. I don’t think she is even aware of her own insight. All these years I’ve been searching for the quick jabs of unsustainable joy that introspection brings. I pay them no attention now; knowing the etiology of abnormal emotions is never enough to prohibit feeling them. A life of frenetic attempts at distracting the mind from such emotions lingers abaft.
The hitchhiker plants her fist into my cheek, shelving it there. “Where to, boss.”
I cough. I am beginning to find myself reluctantly attracted to her. Not that I want to be: loneliness amplifies my universal affection; I no longer obey it. I can’t subsist otherwise.
“Not sure.”
She spins me around so there’s no chance of not facing her. I have hardly driven anywhere; I’m not even driving. We are only a couple blocks away from the entrance of the park. I make exiting the car resemble something that requires a behemothic amount of effort, although in this case, it does.
Outside, the hitchhiker looks at me suspiciously. I goad her to follow me, and saunter foreknowingly towards the park.

In my absence, the crowd has disposed of the guards. A dismembered arm juts out from the storm drain, caricatured. Their helmets have been pilfered, though the guards look more faceless without them fastened. The bodies of the dancers—what’s left of them—have been strewn across the expansive field that the entrance outlet unfurls into. The teenagers that were lurking behind the shrubbery have been impaled into the trees. The hitchhiker gasps and shrieks, tremblingly grasping onto me and groping desperately to shield her eyes. My feet stub into the mass of gored bodies and detached ligaments as we wade through the field. I drift hazily along side the hitchhiker, she as terrified at my lack of reaction as she is at the massacre beheld.
We blindly guide our way, the hitchhiker’s hypervigilant consternation causing her to become tantalizingly intimate towards me. I do not need to see to know where I’m going. The only thing I’m afraid of anymore is the novelty of something that engrosses me wearing off. It is a harrowing search to find new methods of idling.
Eventually I see torches in the distance, hurled and flung raucously by the crowd. They have reached the trees where the girl is sanctioned. Their torches keep the faint traces of mist above them aglow, rendering their foreheads visible. I unlatch my gun from its holster and fire a shot into the sky, first frustrating myself by forgetting to turn off the safety. All the torches freeze in place at once. I can see the crowd checking to make sure they just heard what they thought they did, whispering aghast amongst themselves.
The hitchhiker puts her hand on my arm, startled by the shot. She gnaws on her lip restively, having had no idea that I was in possession of an unlicensed firearm. We watch the crowd sequentially begin to stumble about and scatter, bungling and tripping over each other in the dark.

The riders and their horses are, dead, already having been dead, but now even more so, warped irrevocably. Their corpses are scorched with soot and singed into the ground, crumbled and gangling. Their jaws hang open, unaffected.
I stare up at the girl, nestled in the tree. Would she even be safer at home? I climb into the tree and prop myself up next to her. She shivers, only blinking when I raise my hand to calm her. The hitchhiker beams at me from below. I am confused as to why I even feel the need to save anyone. It might seem something to do naturally out of the good will of one’s heart, but after doing it a countless number of times it becomes routine and unbearable just like all other favors.
The little girl hesitantly huddles against me; it must be getting colder.