You’re new here, right?
	Yeah, just moved in.
	Wanna go to the playground?
	Sure. Of course.
	It’s haunted, though.
	By what? Dead kids?
	Not at first. They came later.

We didn’t know something was wrong with the playground when the first kid died.
Well, he didn’t die on the playground, exactly, so.
When the first kid got onto the swings,
propelled himself higher, higher, higher
oh shit
OH SHIT
and WHEEE! away he flew, fifty metres maybe, at a neat eighty-degree angle,
the same as his neck when they found him…
Well, that seemed a little odd, to have flown that far by himself.

The next kid, on the slide, I think
that’s when we started saying, hey, something’s not right.
Your average top speed on a slide, it shouldn’t
make you break your ankles when you reach bottom,
and it really shouldn’t leave a crater,
it can’t—but it did—hammer the kid into the dirt like a carny driving a spike into the
ground.

Too late the kids on the merry-go-round knew something was off,
spinning around at (a conservative) 500 rpm.
It took a week to find those bodies, nobody knowing exactly
the trajectory of take-off when their sweaty little hands lost their grip.
That’s not quite true.
They found Sandy pretty quickly, where she connected with the climbing net.
They’re pretty sure it was Sandy, anyway. No one else
was wearing a sundress in that lemon-yellow with the white lace trim.
(Pretty sure it was a sundress. Lemon-yellow, anyway.)
(Some of it.)

	What the hell, says the new kid,
	that’s bullshit, you’re making this up.
	OH REALLY.
	Come to the playground and we’ll show you.
	Not even at midnight. Daytime. Right now.
	An uncomfortable shuffle. Yeah, but my mother—
	Hey, I get it.
	Just don’t go by yourself.
	You might get hurt.
	…
	Okay, but only for an hour, all right?
	Yeah sure. An hour’s plenty.

Little faces burning pink despite the rain clouds overhead,
Noses wrinkling in a sensory memory of
funnel cakes and roasting corn.
Stickiness underfoot, unseen offerings on hard-packed earth,
where upset tummies spilled their libations in relief
or sacrifice.

	We’ll start here with the talk tubes.
	Talk tubes? That’s baby stuff. What’s over—

We grab their arms.
	Don’t wander off.
	Stay here and put your ear against the tube.
We jog across to its twin,
listening for the electrical sparks of bumper cars travelling in packs.
	Listen.

The new kid muffles the speaker with their hand before leaning in.
No one’s gullible enough to fall for that old trick.
Doesn’t matter.
	Hi there, we whisper.
	AAAAAHHHHHHaaaaAAAAAAhhhHHHHHHAAAAHHHHHHHH
comes out the other side.

	Jesus! says the new kid. What the fuck? What the fuck?
	Was this built on a cemetery or something?
	Nah, just an amusement park.
	It used to be popular, but, you know.
	Prices went up. Sales dropped off. People stopped coming.
	Everyone who could, moved away.
	The park died.
	The adults who stayed, they fought
	to get this place built.
	They wanted something for us kids.
	They try, you know. They do try.

The new kid edges around,
looks at the swings, steel chains shiny and oiled,
the covered slide howling from its plastic throat,
the climbing net …
They stop looking at the climbing net.

	They oughta tear this place down.
	They tried, you know.
	They sent a man in a bulldozer to take out the seesaw.
	Have you ever seen a bulldozer from underneath?
	mud falling from its treads as it’s flung into the sky?
	the driver a second dot as he jumps from the cab in reckless terror?
	the adults yelling RUN, RUN
	IT’S COMING DOWN
	and us kids huddling under the slide and against the poles of the swing,
	knowing we’re safest in the playground, knowing
	the adults made a mistake?
	You’d remember it if you saw it.
	So what’s the sandpit?

We think it’s the Lost and Found, but we don’t really know.
We don’t talk about the sandpit.

The ground starts to shake and there’s the crackle of overhead wires.
The new kid’s looking at the sandpit, at a half-buried doll,
not paying attention.
We push them, hard, and grab their shirt lickety-split and pull them back
from the bumper car as it whizzes past,
hot dry wind whooshing through our hair,
scorched rubber coating our tongues.

	Watch your step! we joke.
	Fuck off!

They push us and we grab their arms, because
the damn cars never travel alone,
but one of them clips their leg and they’re thrown against the slide.
shit.
	Roll under it! we yell. They can’t get you under there!
The new kid’s crying.

	This place wants to kill you!
	No it doesn’t, it doesn’t, really it doesn’t.
	It wants excitement, that’s all.
	It wants to have fun.
	It’s trying to play.
	Are you not having fun?
	I want to go home!
	Well ooh lah de dah.
	Too good for us, huh?
	Hey, wait. Don’t leave.
	We’ve got plenty of time.

The new kid’s limping to the edge of the park.
We hurry over to give them a hand.
They slap it away, and then
curiously
deliberately
tap our shoulder and pat our head.

	You’re weird, we say.
	I thought maybe you were a ghost.
	Dead or alive, we’re safest here.
	I’m going home.
	Hey.
	What?
	Can we come over for dinner?

The new kid looks over the playground again, at all of us
hiding behind the equipment, emerging snail-like, turtle-like,
ready for their response.

	I, I don’t think so. We’re still moving in.
	Tomorrow?
	I gotta go.

And they run off-balance, fresh bruise on their calf, sunburn peeling their face,
while the rest of us huddle alone in this place.