Ice Cream Series #1 at Washington Square, Pastel, by John Cummings
Swings
On the morning after Thanksgiving, the park was full of parents and children. There were only two toddler swings, and we claimed one for our granddaughter, Charlotte. Who, by the way, is a chunk.
When the other toddler swing came free, a mother in a soft print blouse shyly approached with her two boys and placed one of them in the rubber bucket while trying to keep hold of the other. In her slightly silvered ponytail, she looked worn, and intelligent, and sad.
She had just managed to get the one boy swinging high into the air when a young man with a thin goatee came bustling up as if making rounds in a hospital and said to her, “I told you we do the swings last.”
Then he turned abruptly and left.
Her chin quivered. She brought the swing to a sudden halt.
“Why are we stopping?” the one boy said.
“I forgot,” she told him, her voice faint and strangely even. “I forgot that we do the swings last.”
As she hoisted him out with both hands, her other boy shot away, right into the path of chunky Charlotte.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” we said.
Too late. Charlotte’s feet came full force into the back of his little head and knocked him flat. He started wailing. His mother looked up and left his brother dangling half out of the bucket, and he started crying too. For a moment, she hesitated between them.
“We’re so sorry,” we said. “So sorry.”
___________
Paul Willis
Review by Dave Mehler
My friend, Craig Goodworth, also published in this issue, has this idea and tells me that sometimes its our job as witnesses to tragedy to look on with soft eyes, rather than to turn away. It takes a certain amount of strength to keep on looking, then to bear witness to the suffering of others. This little prose poem by Paul Willis, or vignette, or flash fiction(?) is just such an observation and a bearing of witness, it seems to me. There is nothing else one can do, but observe and document. And my job to publish. It’s a good, sad, worthy piece of writing, something like what and the way I might write it. This editor is biased, but Willis’ piece deserves to be seen and read. Now we are all aggrieved witnesses.