At Play in Time

We are at the little playground outside, under the shade of the live oak & the mountain cedar, the light wind glancing past off the lake. We have watched the geese haltingly assemble in their vees, craned our heads after seeing the cormorant dip into the water overlong. The heron came & went already, balking at our nearness with a guttural exhortation the ugliness of which stood in stark relief to her beauty & grace. We are none of us what we seem, I suppose. 

We are playing dinosaur, as usual, & Ada has declared that the meteor betokening our mass extinction event is en route & that our annihilation is imminent. She trespasses the threshold of that event dozens of times a week, utterly at wonder with the finality of it, the surety of its consequence. How time seems to just upend itself & the world to shrug off millions of years in an instant. She likes, in the game, for us to inhabit that liminal space between the meteor strike & the cascade of apocalyptic effects it spurred into place. The shockwaves, the ever-expanding circumference of fiery heat, the upswelling oceans. She tells me to grab Whitman & hide beneath the slide. I look at her, hunched over with her fingers splayed like a Tyrannosaurus, her untameable curls a dynamo in even the smallest of breezes, her eyes squinting against the sun, & I am paralyzed. My chest caves in on itself & I fight back a sob & tell her I can’t play any game that involves her no longer existing, can’t pretend to see our world ending, can’t bring myself even to imagine what goodbye would feel like on my lips. She asks me why & I tell her that I simply love her too much to pretend my love isn’t in the way of our imagining. She says okay, asks me what I want to play instead. Baby lions, I say, or tigers, or maybe, if it would be alright, just this once, let’s play human dad & daughter & son. I give her a hug & we run circles around Whitman, who looks up & laughs his bright laugh & lets all the talk of beginnings & ends shrug off into the grass, some artifact for another day. The heron settles on the dock across the cove. The sky has emptied itself of geese & their scattered calls. The world, thinking itself at peace.