by Kate Wagner
In the backyard of the Krippners’—small but well-shaded with trees and guarded by a tall fence—a simple playset made from thick beams of wood converges into two points like a sawhorses—swings on one side, slide and platform on another. Under the truss of the slide is a small sandbox. In it, hidden from view, two children, boy six and girl four, form a single pink mass topped with two flashes of blonde hair.
Harry straddles Lily and pins her wrists against the sand which is not quite stable enough for him to secure them completely. He is pressing and pressing and pressing against her until the sand gives way around her, comes up, almost, to the top of her stomach, wet, thick sand from yesterday’s rain which feels pliant and cool against her skin.
He doesn’t know why he is pressing against her, nor why he is pinning her down. He thinks it has something to do with the sand and with leaving her impression in it, not so different from forcing putty into a mold or a cookie cutter into fresh, sweet dough. But this he can’t quite believe; the thought comes almost from outside himself. He senses that something is wrong, can’t tell if it is straddle-wrong or pinion-wrong or pressure-wrong, but there’s an open and flushed look on his face and he’s panting slightly, not entirely without fear—of her struggle, of her starting to cry at any moment, because then he will have to stop, the pressure will have to stop, the pressure, he senses, that would otherwise end of its own accord, just like when there are no more stairs left to climb or when the swing reaches its apogee and must fall back to earth, yanked by its chain just a little too roughly.
Lily rocks against and widens the outline the sand provides her and her world is silent. She can hear only the throbbing of her pulse against her ears. She is neither breathing nor holding her breath; her grip on the inside of her hands is loose. She looks up at her brother with wide eyes, not unlike the way a cat looks out the window or a cow across the field. She does not struggle. She likes the kneading of her body against the sand. It reminds her of the once great surf of the bathtub from when she was smaller, which was not so long ago, but is already sorely missed, as though it had happened to somebody else.
Lily only understands her brother’s pressure as dead weight, as the thing pressing her deeper into the earth. How long will it keep happening? She asks: How much deeper into the sand can I go? It takes quite some time for the horror, deferred by the pleasure of motion against a wet, cool place, to wash over her: that she can’t move, that his eyes are vacant and unseeing, which means he is not there, that he is doing something to her.
Harry recenters his weight, presses hard the wrong way and all of a sudden Lily shrieks and bursts into tears, even though she knows he hasn’t hurt her that badly. But Harry doesn’t know this and he doesn’t stop pressing; in fact, he presses even harder against her. Hot tears begin to form in his own eyes because he doesn’t know why, because she is taking the pressure away from him and he isn’t finished with it, he isn’t finished until Lily screams No, Harry, and in an instant Harry’s hands leave her as though he’s touched something hot. For a moment there is stillness, the smell of dense plastic respirating in the summer sun, the out of sync heaving of breath in confined air. The door to the back porch opens and a voice calls out saying Harry? Harry? What did I tell you about being rough with your sister? With those same, wide eyes, Lily looks back up toward her brother. The threat, too, of another scream.
______
Kate Wagner is a writer and critic living in Chicago, IL. Her essays have been published in The Nation, The Baffler, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She is also an award winning sportswriter covering professional cycling.
[GO HOME.]