Author’s Note: Another little one-shot thing, this one considerably more bitter and much shorter than the last. This is actually the first thing I wrote in the first Creative Writing class (1/26/05), and we were only given fifteen minutes to write it so it’s really short. The class flatlined after I read it, and one girl actually said she didn’t understand it at all. I like how it came out, though, and that’s what matters, right?

I hope that anyone reading this can understand it where my classmates didn’t.

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Monkey Bars

“Forgive me, forgive me not. Like a flower, you know?”

There’s no room for forgiveness in me yet. Some wounds are too deep and memories too dark to heal or bring to light. I would rather forget, I think.

“It’s been six years since you saw him last,” she says. “Don’t you miss him? wouldn’t you be sad if he, like, I dunno, died or something?”

“Maybe,” I reply, kicking my feet back and forth, back and forth. The place I sit, seven feet up on top of the monkey bars at the park, is cold. Metallic. Dead. “If he were dead,” I say after a moment, “I might be sorry. But I don’t think I would be said because he was dead.”

She quirks an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

I lift my eyes to face the sky, the gray clouds so ready to play their drums I can taste the electricity in the air, and I smile. My eyes are dark, but this grin is darker. “I’d be sorry because I wasn’t the one responsible.

She gapes, pale eyes wide, and is still for several seconds. Then she is gone. I don’t know when she climbed down or when she left the park, but she’s gone.

She doesn’t understand. She has both sides--father, mother. Her life in clean-cut, her future set and clear.

“I would be sorry,” I continue to the wind and the clouds and the monkey bars, “that I didn’t get to watch. I would be sorry that I didn’t get to hit him like he hit me. I would be sorry--”

My eyes sting, and I break off to wipe away tears that make no sense. “I would be sorry because I’d never know what he felt. I would be sorry because he’d never know the fear and pain that I felt.”

I close my eyes as rain begins to fall. The droplets are cold, like the metal I am perched on, but they do not feel dead to me. Or is it dead like me?

“I...I would be sorry.”

End