Fiction
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In the evenings, I imagined some way of connecting with my girls on the weekends they stayed with me—games to play, meals to cook, something, anything—and sketched out a design for a swing set. They’d been growing quieter, more distant and said they didn’t like the way my place smelled—Like farts and old potato chips, Briar said—and complained there was nothing to do.
“It’s okay to be bored sometimes,” I explained, even though I wanted them to play outside more anyways.
“Yeah, but all the time?” Briar asked.
“All the time, Dad,” Cara echoed. Since the divorce, she would imitate whatever her sister did, her own voice chanting half a beat behind Briar’s. She must have learned that from hearing me argue with her mother, who accused me of using the girls to win a game only I was playing. She said I was a child. I wanted the swing set for the girls, but I also wanted it to prove her wrong.
The apartment complex had a common area, a patchy plot of land with a rusted-out charcoal grill and chipping picnic table, where I envisioned a refuge for my girls. I had only ever seen Davey Reynolds, who lived two floors below with his mother, play alone there, throwing tufts of grass into the air and catching the blades. I pictured my girls playing underneath the canopy of the large acacia tree where I would build it.
“No more teachers, no more books,” Briar said, the first weekend of summer, dropping her backpack at my feet. Cara wasn’t far behind her. The girls weren’t scheduled to stay with me again until the last weekend of June, and I wanted the swing set complete by then, something to give me an edge above the rigidity of their mother.
Promising to do personal projects for him once or twice a quarter, I convinced the building super to block out a second garage where I could store all my tools, the collection, the only thing connecting me to my old trade. He’d thrown me a lifeline: he knew most of the tools lining the walls hadn’t been paid for, exactly. With them, I’d built kitchen cabinets and beveled baseboards, and now they’d be used to build something different. Every tool I had I intended on returning, having borrowed them in the first place only for personal projects, but the foreman, walking the floor like he was smuggling a cactus up his ass, called me into his office, and that was that.
I kept the tools because I was still full of all the things I had not yet built. As I worked, I pictured the swing set in its details, the frame and design of it. I needed it to teach my girls about the ups and downs of life, the quick passing of every joy and sorrow. Love, too, needed someone to push it. In their very play, the wooden frame I had structured would show them these things. I wouldn’t tell them a word of this until the questions came on their own, and then I could point outside to the swing set and ask them, What has your mother ever built for you?
All the swing set materials were stored in that garage, and I was working in the parking lot with a chalk line and band saw when Davey Reynolds sidled up to me. Davey, a classmate of Briar’s, was lanky, years behind in maturity from his peers, and always wore a ridiculous tasseled ski cap—even in the heat of summer. It was pulled so low over his ears that the tassels came past his shoulders. Once, I thought I caught him scratching under its wool, his eyes closed and leaning against the wall like an old man, but he jerked upright and straightened his cap when he heard me.
The chalk line coughed against a plank. I would have ignored Davey if he hadn’t lingered outside the open garage, eyes examining the swing set pieces. Davey tortured the neighbors with his neediness, stitching scraps of attention into a cloak he wrapped around himself. Though his voice was still very much a child’s, Davey’s face shone with focused curiosity, completely unaware of how he sounded.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
I snapped the chalk line twice before answering. “I’m building a swing set for my girls,” I said.
“I’d like to play on it,” he said.
“Maybe someday.”
Mosquitos had feasted on his neck, the bites mottling his skin in angry red patches. Even his hands, flecked with flea bites, were too worn and haggard for someone his age.
“You can push me on the swing.”
I had imagined everything about the swing set’s design, honing, sharpening, planing its meager boards to match every angle of my expectations, and pushing Davey was not something I had pictured.
“I’ll go higher than your little girls ever could,” he said, grinning, unaware of how infantile his words sounded.
He stayed anchored just outside, watching. His eyes moved over the planks like a chainsaw, mangling my precision. With a spade bit, I bored a hole through one of the posts and said I had lots of work still to do.
“My mom doesn’t want me out here,” he said. “But I don’t mind,” he said, oblivious.
I clicked my tongue. “Can’t be here without safety goggles,” I said, knowing he didn’t have any and wanting my space back.
“Why are you building something? My mom says you ruin things. Like your family.”
“I think it’s time to go, Davey,” I said.
He was already too old for his years, resentment drawn across him like a shield. I stopped my work until he spun around, his heavy backpack clanging into my saw horses. The plank teetered, and I steadied it with a sharp breath, more startled from the suddenness than any real danger to my hands. I watched as Davey plodded toward the apartment doors. I tightened and tightened the bolt until my wrist ached, until that scrawny figure was swallowed into our building.
✹✹✹
My girls did not like Davey Reynolds.
Last summer, for an end-of-the-school-year gift, Briar and Cara’s mother had given them old perfume bottles, cheap ones, which they brought with them one weekend. This was near the first months after the divorce. With sweeping, imaginative gestures, Briar convinced Cara they needed to empty the bottles so they could display the glittering jars. The two of them spun around in the courtyard spraying the perfume until the bottles were nearly empty when Davey ran out to them and asked if he could join. Briar promised that if Cara and Davey helped her, they could each keep a bottle.
“I could put my special rocks in one,” he said, holding the bottle up with reverence.
Briar snatched the bottle back.
“These aren’t for rocks, dumb-dumb,” she said.
“What’re they for?”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged with one shoulder. “But they’re not for rocks.”
The three of them ran around the patchy courtyard emptying those bottles spray by spray. Davey, his arm out stiffly, chased a scarred squirrel up a tree and afterward ran into the cloud of perfume.
“Fuck you,” he laughed, throwing the bottle after it. His tassels swirled, and the bottle shattered.
They came in reeking of cheap cotton candy and talc, the chemicals stinging my eyes.
When Davey went to leave, he picked up two bottles to take home, and Briar ripped them from his hands.
Davey protested. “You promised I could keep one if I helped!”
“You broke yours, dumb-dumb,” she said. “These are mine.”
“But you promised,” he said. “I was going to put rocks in mine.”
“How’re you gonna get rocks in them, dumb-dumb? The caps don’t come off,” she said, wearing a proud and vicious smile.
Later, Briar lined the bottles on her nightstand, the light scattering in purple shards. I contemplated what she saw in those fragile little jars, what wonder was trapped in their stained little shapes and their lingering scent. Contemplated, but never asked.
✹✹✹
Davey loved rocks. He collected them, digging in the rodent-furrowed courtyard after school with a hand shovel. Always, by his feet, was a tattered shoe box he dropped his discoveries into. Some neighbors called the super when Davey spent the afternoon throwing rocks at the scarred squirrel, but because he always missed, the super didn’t do much more than give Davey a quick talking to. Whenever you bumped into him waiting for the elevator or along the sidewalks, he’d launch into a litany of facts he had scrounged together. After telling me about the sea fossils on Mount Everest, prattling on about ammonites and trilobites, he asked, “Do you know how old the Acasta Gneiss is?”
“I don’t even know what the Acasta Gneiss is, Davey.”
“Oldest rock on the planet. Like super old. Guess how old. Four billion years. It’s in Canada. In the Slave Craton. I bet Briar and Cara don’t know where the Slave Craton is.”
“They might,” I said, defending them gently. “They’re smarter than I was at their age.”
“Pfff,” he said, unimpressed while stepping off the elevator. He knocked the tassels of his cap when he raised his hand to wave goodbye.
A week after school let out, while the concrete for the posts was curing, Davey came by the garage, carrying a box of rocks he had found while digging in the courtyard. He brought them out one by one and set them on the lid.
“Feldspar, gabbro, chert,” he recited more than said.
Strictly out of pity, I tried to find some mild question. “Where’d you learn all this?”
He shrugged and dumped the rocks back into the shoe box.
✹✹✹
Then, after the girls left, the week turned wet, ruining the concrete. The girls continued to complain over the phone that there was nothing to do when they stayed with me. Though each had their own bed, they shared a cramped room, and we had to wash dishes by hand, like I did as a kid. What annoyed me most was that they weren’t wrong. It’s why I wanted the swing set at all, to make my place somewhere they would want to come to, somewhere they would want to stay.
“What do you want to do, girls?” I, drying the plates, asked over my shoulder.
Whatever Briar answered, Cara would agree to.
“Let’s play curses,” she said, kicking the table leg.
“How do you play?”
“We say something mean about someone, and the next person has to say something meaner about the same person. Davey Reynolds smells like vinegar.”
I tried to stop them, but Cara followed quickly.
“Davey Reynolds wets the bed.”
“Davey Reynolds has no—” Briar started when I bolted to my feet, my voice rising even faster.
“If you girls don’t stop right now, there’ll be no swing set to play on. You’re being mean.”
“That’s the point, Dad,” Briar snapped.
At dinner, Cara, carving shapes into her food with her fork, asked, “When’s the swing set going to be done, Daddy?”
Outside, the rain came down in torrents. Unless her fears had changed, I thought, the lightning would drive Cara to my bed.
“I need a week without rain, CarBear.”
Briar huffed. “What are we supposed to do until then?”
“Davey Reynolds lives in this building,” I said. “You could play with him. Go rock hunting.”
Briar said none of the other kids played with him. “At recess, he just sits in the grass and pull it out blade by blade,” she said. “He’s always wearing that stupid hat.”
“No one likes him, Dad,” Cara added.
“They say his mom beats him like a dusty rug,” Briar said loudly, tapping her plate with her fork. “He wears the hat to hide his bruises.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say. Where’d you learn this game?”
“We play it at recess.”
“Oh,” I said. “Would you ever play that when you’re at your mom’s?”
“No,” Briar said. “Mom doesn’t let us do what we want.”
“Well, still,” I said, twisting my mouth, imagining all the little curses they might’ve said about me. “If you’re bored enough, you can play with Davey. It doesn’t have to be all day,” I said. “Play in the basement or play tag in the hallways. I’ll work on the swing set in the garage.” They weren’t budging. “He’ll probably spend more time with me than he will with you.”
“Fine,” Briar relented, rolling her eyes.
“Fine,” Cara echoed, gesture included.
I might have been woken that night by a loud crack of thunder, but I was thinking of what Briar said, how their mother didn’t let them do what they wanted. It meant I let them do what they wanted. I let them do what they wanted, and still, when they stayed with me, they could think of nothing to do. When the thunder quieted, I heard my girls talking in the next room. They were trying to whisper. Frightened, Cara had crept into Briar’s bed.
She asked how much longer they had to stay with me.
✹✹✹
The next morning, I was all the more determined to make something the girls would enjoy. Davey, though, was waiting for me in the hallway wearing a pair of safety goggles. Disheveled, he tried to hide the pride he was feeling, passing the lenses off as natural and routine. His presence both an aggravation and a distraction, he lugged his shoe box of rocks under his arm, a streak of sweaty hair poking out from under that tasseled ski cap.
His voice searching, he asked, “When’s the swing set gonna be done?”
“Well, the rain’s ruined the concrete,” I answered, calculating a new timeline for my girls. The elevator doors closed on us. “If we have a streak of nice weather, I think I can finish in a few days. Maybe a week.”
He chuffed. “That long?”
The bell chimed, and the doors opened.
“Dig with me?” he asked before either of us had stepped off.
“My girls are with me this week,” I said, looking at my watch.
“What? They can’t dig, too?”
“Maybe next weekend.”
“Yeah,” he said, accustomed to such answers. “Maybe.”
But I felt guilty for brushing Davey off. I lost sleep over it and took my girls to the library, where I checked out books on geology and petrology. After spending some time reading about the Acasta Gneiss, I understood that Davey thought of the Acasta Gneiss as some hulking mountain tucked away in the cold wild of Canada, when in reality it’s an immense field of exposed bedrock, weathered and eroded to bare patches. Resting on tectonic plates, the continents have shifted and collided, split and merged over long millennia. A craton, I learned, is a section of this crust which has survived.
All the rain in the world had not eroded the Acasta Gneiss, but my own attempts at making something lasting had crumpled in days. A week of rain and the four posts for concrete were ruined. Surges of envy went through me as I thought of Davey’s obsession with that rock formation. Even if he was only repeating what he had read in some book, he knew of things that had, until a month before, remained completely unknown to me. He was pulled in by something ancient and indestructible, something strong and anchored and permanent, and though to geologists the Acasta Gneiss is a mystery, to me it seemed Davey’s thrill with it bore deeper into its surface than any explorer.
Meanwhile, as it thundered, my girls jumped on their beds and played curses until they tired themselves with anger.
✹✹✹
That the girls were with their mother for ten days gave me plenty of time to pour and set new concrete posts and finish the swing set, which Davey watched with a loud and annoying enthusiasm, repeating his age-old question. He sat cross-legged under the acacia. When I used truss plates on the braces and cross beam, he asked if he could help. I nodded him over and had him mark the places where I’d put the swing hangers, and he asked what we were doing, as though I withheld from him some necessary knowledge. Explaining what the fuck I was doing took as long as the task itself, and I would have been done in half the time were it not for his questions.
I stepped back and admired the swing, finished, save for the leather seats, which I hadn’t put on yet, knowing Davey would be the first to jump on them—but that honor was saved for my daughters.
I tried explaining this to Davey, but he crossed his arms, his lips rumpling as though his inner monologue let loose with a tirade of accusations.
Wrenching control of the conversation in a short lull, I said, “I read about the, the whuddyacallit.” I twirled my hammer, playing dumb. “That rock you were telling me about.”
Davey’s eyes grew wide. “The Acasta Gneiss?”
“That’s the one.”
His legs shot straight out, and he rose to his feet awkwardly. “I know all about it. A huge rock. The oldest in the world. One day I’m going to climb it.”
Hearing him talk, I realized that this thing which fascinated him was nothing like he imagined it, and that one day his dream of climbing it would crumble. His arms stretched upward in a display of strength as he described the size of the ancient rock, claiming its jagged surface as his own, ignorant of the reality: a surface scarred flat by relentless years, whatever heaving grandeur had been its own now buried beneath vast, unremarkable plains.
I ran my hand along the smooth joists, ready to weatherproof them.
Another moment of envy, that Davey had not yet learned what I hoped to teach my daughters: the fleeting nature of joy and sadness—how every mountain flattens to a field and every promise to the self erodes to a mere wish.
Let the child be a child.
✹✹✹
I stared out my window at the swing set standing in the courtyard. My girls were set to come the next day for a long week. I had circled the day on my calendar weeks before, imagining how they would react to the swing set. If a mere game of curses could fill them with such energy as it had, showing them the swing set I had built would run them wild.
Someone knocked twice at my door. The sound, in which I sensed haste and anger, electrified me. I opened the door to a woman not many years younger than me, a thick headband holding her hair back. Her hands on her hips and a razor-like squint, she looked every bit like the girls’ mother had at the end of our marriage, planed and sanded thin by many different cares others never considered.
“Are you Briar Campbell’s father?” she started, hands on her hips.
When I said I was, her hands dropped.
“What the fuck is your problem?”
Immediately from her tone, I knew she was Davey’s mother. She leaned forward. Her words punctured the air the way a nail does wood, seeking a stronger hold. Beneath that sharp tone, I sensed a desperate strain in her to hold things together.
“My boy, David, said you had him build the swing set with you today? That you had him do a bunch of work on it? Are you out of your mind? He’s ten! He could have gotten hurt.”
She might have waited for a response from me, but there was none coming. She went on, “I hear your daughters play their cruel little game. They say that I hit him and that he hides the marks with his hat. It’s bad enough the kids tease him about his hair. Why don’t you correct them? Do some actual parenting?”
In the short time she stood there, her glare faltered, her posture stooped. She lost her squinting glare, her face collapsing into exasperated worry, her voice went empty, and she thumbed away one tear from each eye.
“He pulls his hair out. Whole tufts of it,” she said, and glanced down as she crossed her arms. “It’s why he always wears the hat, to hide the bald patches and the scars.”
Like a board riddled with nails, the edges of her desperation snagged me. In the workshop, I would’ve thrown aside such a worthless little scrap, not even good enough for minor projects and repairs. But here, in my doorway, this woman wielded that little lumber like a weapon I had no defense against.
“Other kids even tease him about liking rocks. And now he comes around, and you put him in front of dangerous tools. I don’t want him working with you again. If he gets injured, they’ll take him away. He’s been uprooted too many times already. I can’t let that happen—I won’t.”
“Don’t treat me like I’m the one making fun of him,” I shot.
She straightened, her hands returning to her hips, now in a posture of warning.
“Don’t you think I have enough to worry about? You should know it isn’t easy being a single parent. Why’re you making it more difficult?
She was waiting for an answer I couldn’t give.
She went on. “He’s just a child, and he’s already got more to deal with than I’d wish on my enemy. I don’t want to think of him out here risking himself on some pet project a washed-up neighbor’s working on to impress his spoiled daughters.”
Her eyes unfastened those bolts of pride holding me upright.
“I was a carpenter,” I defended.
“Was? You slap a few boards together and suddenly you’re a carpenter, huh?”
“I know what I’m doing,” I said, the words flicking out like a dull saw blade, useless and dangerous, warbling in the air.
“Just stay away,” Davey’s mom, already halfway down the hall, said, pushing my excuses aside with a swat of her hand, but that was loitered just outside my door. Was, was, was—it had come out instinctually, reciting some fact I’d read from an encyclopedia, and already that time felt like a long, distant past, a reminder of how far I’d drifted from my craft.
At first, I thought I was angry at Davey’s mom for exposing me, for hammering me back into a weak defense. But her words, that was, reminded me of some deeper anger, the accusations I’d hurled at myself when I started building the swing set in the first place. I had wanted to prove I could build something lasting. Something that mattered. Like me, she too was trying to make something solid and secure for her child, not with bolts and planks, but with rules and limits.
We weren’t so different, I felt, but that only made my anger all the worse. It stared me in the face. I tried to keep that lingering guest out, but that was kept me from shutting the door. It asked me What the fuck are you doing?
✹✹✹
The morning crawled by in a dazzling light, the sky cloudless, a gentle breeze lifting the branches of the acacia and pivoting the seats of the swings almost undetectably. I waited impatiently for my girls to be dropped off, to take them to the courtyard, and show them the finished project. Davey was outside, chasing around the scarred squirrel. By lunch, I had convinced myself that it was better if I stopped talking to him at all, and that after summer was over and school started again, this would be all the easier to do.
In the afternoon, Briar and Cara curled out of their mother’s car, pulling their backpacks behind them like snails from a shell. Their hair was still wet from a recent shower, and with their postures, they were already confronting the boredom they thought the week would hold.
“Did Mom tell you I have a surprise?” I asked.
This perked them up. Cara shook her head, and Briar said, “No. She doesn’t tell us anything.”
Holding their hands, I gave their arms playful wiggles and motioned behind the apartment building.
“Let’s see,” I said, raising my brow.
Cara ran ahead, and Briar let go of my hand but stayed close.
“Just wait a minute, CarBear,” I said. I wanted the three of us to see the completed swing set together. “I need to talk to your mother.”
She stood by her car, arms crossed, cinching her beige cardigan tightly around her waist. The sheer exasperation of her look brought me a whiff of strength. The wind teased a strand of light hair over her cheek. Her mouth twisted—frustrated, tired already—and she raised her eyes to ask me what I wanted.
“Do you want to see what I built?” I asked, turning to widen the invitation, show a bit of pride.
She hesitated, not curious but aggravated. “What you built?”
“A swing set. I told you last week. For when they come over.”
Her voice could dovetail years of disappointment into a single moment. “This is the project you had Davey Campbell help you with, right?”
Her eyes squinted against the breeze. I had no way of answering.
“I don’t get you,” she said, her arms dropping. “Fired for stealing—”
“Keeping. Not stealing.”
“Keeping, without permission, a bunch of tools which weren’t yours. You think building this, this whatever, for them is some kind of triumph,” she said, tossing out her hands in a gesture of resignation. She licked her lips and glanced at her feet. She was holding back, exactly the way she had when we knew our marriage was ending.
“Well, you,” I said. “What have you ever built for them?”
The question halted her on the spot. She stared at me for a moment and then laughed and opened her car door. “Only their bodies,” she said. “I hope they enjoy it.”
I turned the corner, the swing set towering there like a monument in the grassy flatness of that yard. The sun was bright, scoring the beams with its rays. Pride surged through me now, the way envy had when I spoke with Davey. I could smell the scent of wood on my hands as though fragrant splinters lodged there. I waited to see my daughters sprint to the seats, pump their legs, and play. To see who could climb higher, who could leap farthest—games I enjoyed when I was their age.
Cara was yelping, jumping in a swing, and wiggling comfortably. A shout of joy, a rush to the swings—I waited for both of them from Briar, but she stood with her head tilted like I’d offered her a hole-riddled vase.
“A swing set?” Briar asked. “A swing set, Dad? We aren’t babies.”
Cara sprang off the seat as though it burned her.
“Yeah, Dad,” she echoed. “We aren’t babies.”
We three stood there in a pit of cold silence.
“Can we go inside, Dad? I want to check on my perfume bottles.”
“They’re so pretty,” Cara squealed.
Cara, I knew, had only been imitating her sister, but in their quick rejection of the swing set, I felt myself carved empty. I put my hand on Cara’s head. Whatever Briar had wanted to put in those empty bottles, I stored in them the scent of their rejection.
“Sure, CarBear,” I said. As I watched them sprint ahead of me into the building, I was thinking of the day Davey would discover the Acasta Gneiss’s barren flatness, that it was nothing he could ever conquer or climb. That his dream was not only brittle but broken from the very start.
✹✹✹
The girls, busy eating their dinner, were too distracted by the TV to hear the loud, excited scream that pulled me to the window in a rush. I looked out and saw Davey running his hands over the beams of the swing set, jumping to try to touch the crossbeam, hurling the swings, and running under them and laughing. I watched him until he tired himself out and sat on the swing, hunched over and stirring his legs lazily, the tassels of his ski cap dangling just above his knees.
I went out to him, and he curled over when he saw me approaching. As though discovered in some act of stealing, he slumped off the swing and flicked it behind him.
“You want a push?” I asked. His posture straightened, excited, and he nodded.
I stood behind him and set a hand on his back, nudging him just a bit.
“You’ll probably be with Briar and Cara all week,” Davey said, every ounce of bitterness withered to a sigh of defeat.
“Probably,” I said truthfully. “Maybe we can all play outside, though.”
I pushed him a bit harder, his legs doing more work.
“You find all your rocks out here?” I asked to distract him.
“Mmhmm,” he said. “Every one.”
I took a step back to let him rise higher, guiding him with one arm until he sat upright.
“You know, Davey,” I said, humphing an exaggerated push. “Your mom came to talk to me the other day. She cares about you a lot.”
He kept swinging, the visit meaning nothing to him.
“You’re a good kid, Davey.”
“I’m the best kid,” he said, grinning. “We built the best swing set.”
“We certainly did,” I said. “And you can come out here whenever you want.”
“I can?”
I nodded.
“And you can push me on the swing, too?”
“Mmhmm,” I lied.
Pulled in by something old and indestructible, something strong and anchored and permanent, Davey shone with hope. He pointed forward with one hand: “I’ll go so high—right over the Acasta Gneiss.”
The swing creaking, I pushed him. My throat snagged on a rusted screw of truth, the sharp edge of Davey’s dream. Turning, it sank deeper into me. Yes, let the child be a child.
“Right over the Acasta Gneiss,” I echoed.
His feet pumped the air and climbed so high I almost believed him.
Formed by his Rust Belt upbringing and Hungarian heritage, G. W. Currier's fiction and poetry have appeared in Saranac Review, Nimrod International Journal, Grand Little Things, The South Dakota Review, Waxwing, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD from Oklahoma State University and has taught at the University of Debrecen in Hungary through a Fulbright scholarship.