Good Reads/Dereck
Digg/dacoatne
Facebook/Dereck
YouTube/dacoatne
Del.icio.us/dacoatne
Technorati/dacoatne
MyBlogLog/dacoatne
Twitter/dacoatne
Playgrounds in the Night
Email this article to a friend
(I want to thank all of the StumbleUpon visitors. Because of you, this story has been viewed over 15,000 times now)
Dusk was coming. The earth rolled away from the sun.
“Son,” asked the man, “what do you need?”
The toddler pulling on the waistband of the man’s jacket, while looking straight up at his father’s face, asked, “Can we go to the park?”
“Not right now, I have several things I have to do tonight, so we’ll have to do it tomorrow, or another day.”
“But why?” asked the boy, oblivious to the answer he had just received.
“Listen son,” said the man, “there are many things I need to do so that I can take care of you. If I don’t do some of these things now, then, when you’re older, you will have to work harder. Do you understand?”
“I guess,” sighed the little boy who looked over his left shoulder at his younger sister, who, with a doll held up to her face, showed the same dismay that the young boy did.
The man realized that they must have been conspiring. He smiled at them both.
“Besides,” the man continued, “it’s getting late. And do you know what that means?”
“No…” both children said playfully through growing smiles.
“It means that there is barely enough time…to be tickled!”
On cue, the children bolted off, giggling while the man chased them, captured them, tickled them and released them each in turn. The ritual, as with many other nights, sent the shrill giggles of children bouncing throughout the house.
Then the phone rang.
The man’s wife called from the kitchen, “Hon, it’s for you…it’s Dr. Benowsky.”
“I’ll take it upstairs,” replied the man.
The man stood up, and walked over to the stairwell. Step by step he ascended. With each step he would reach forward, grabbing the railing in front of him, pulling on it until his foot had arrived at its new step, after which he would reach up and grab the railing again. At the top of the stairs, he turned to his right, as if on a slowly spinning merry-go-round.
Bloop!
A drop could be heard bouncing on the bottom of the bathtub in the room to his left. The light in the hallway he was in was low, but it was brighter at the end, where his study’s door was partway open. A fuzzy cone of light spread down the hallway and across the walls. As he walked down the hallway, the cone became more narrow. He felt like he was getting smaller, that the hallway was shrinking as he advanced.
The hallway continued to stretch out before him, getting longer each time he took another step. Time was slow.
When he arrived at the end of the hall, he pushed the study door all the way open and walked around his desk and sat down. He paused for a just a second, then picked up the phone.
“Dr. Benowsky?”
He heard the click of the phone downstairs being hung up.
“Steve? You there?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” the man said.
“Listen, we got the results in today…I decided to call you, even though it’s a little late.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hey, Steve, listen…are you sitting down?”
“Uh-huh..”
“Listen, I’ve been doing this for years, and…well…quite frankly I’m not very good at this part of my job.”
“Uh-huh…”
“Steve, listen, it’s bad. The worst I’ve ever seen. It’s everywhere…it’s inoperable…”
There was a long silence.
“Steve…I’m so sorry…”
“Steve, listen, uh, I know it’s so soon to talk about these things, but I know some people…you know, they have a great hospice…they’re really good people Steve–known ‘em for years.”
“How long?” asked the man.
“Steve, it’s bad, I mean, really advanced–could be any minute, any day, today, tomorrow, a week, I really don’t know, maybe more…maybe more.”
“Steve, I’m going to let you go for know. Please, take care Steve. Call me.”
Click
The man sensed a buzzing sensation throughout his body. He placed the receiver of the phone down on its base. There was a strange static in the room, in the air. He stood up and mechanically reversed the route he took that brought him to his study. At the top of the stairs, he called down to his wife. She came to bottom of the stairs and smiled up to him.
“Hey you,” she said teasingly.
“Listen,” said the man, “I’m beat, I’m going to head to bed a little early.”
“Sounds good,” she replied, “I’ll head up soon too, right after I put these two down.”
She smiled again. “Oh she didn’t know,” he thought. He smiled back down to her.
“I love you,” he said.
Her grin widened. “I love you too!” she said.
He walked quickly to his bedroom, changed, and climbed in bed. A short while later his wife came in too, and climbed in next to him. She nudged him. He turned his head toward her and she touched his nose with her index finger.
“You know,” she whispered, “I love you…”
He smiled and leaned over, kissed her. They settled into bed. He lay there, staring at the ceiling. After a while, he looked over through the window. He could see the stars.
The earth was still rolling.
He looked back up to the ceiling. The thought of leaving at any given moment, without notice, was unbearable. He imagined his wife, waking in the morning, to find him still, unable to wake him. He imagined the terror in her cries for help while she would try to do something. Maybe she would shake his body. Maybe she would shout at him.
“Steve! Steve! Can you hear me! Oh God…”
“Steve!”
He cried. Tears ran down from his eyes, across his temples and sank into his pillow. He thought of his boy, how we would never get to be the one to teach him how to be a man. He thought of his daughter at some distant wedding, looking to the empty seat where he should be sitting. He thought…
He thought…
He took a deep breath. With his left hand, he wiped his face and sat up. He shook his wife. Alarmed, she sat up too. He got out of bed and began getting dressed. She stared at him with wonder and confusion.
“Get up,” he said.
“We’re going to the park.”
If you enjoyed this, you can join the rss feed and be updated about new material. If you don't know what rss feeds are, this article explains them.
38 Responses to “Playgrounds in the Night”
Leave a Reply
I love it. You should write more fiction!
Wow. Did you just whip that out of your head? That was a gripping little story.
ari
@ mahjong_kid – Will do.
@ Ari – Yeah, came to me while looking out the kitchen window a few nights ago.
It ends where it begins. I like the symmetry.
Great job, Dereck. Keep them coming.
Great, now the next time my daughter asks me to go to the park I won’t be able to say no.
Awesome work.
@ Hayden – Glad you liked the symmetry. There is purpose to it.
@ Writer Dad – Don’t make me interrogate you. What else?
@ Paul – Wait until you see what I’ve got for someone you might know. It’s in the chute. Has been for a very long time now…
That was excellent. Please keep writing.
@ Walls – Thank you Walls…
[...] at I Will Not Die wrote a piece (Playgrounds in the Night) that will move you. When you read it, it will leave you with a sense of urgency to live now. It [...]
What a beautiful story about living, loving & dying! My eyes have been opened to live each moment fully!!
Every time you write a post, or leave a comment on my blog, you and folks like you reward my goals. Thanks.
@ Mary – I’m glad you liked it.
@ Walls – Even without knowing what those goals are, I am still quite glad to participate in them.
Lovely and touching.
@ Dawn – Thank you Dawn!
Although it has an interesting premise, there could have been all kinds of beauty and subtlety throughout the piece but it was clumsily written, something awkward about the voice. The ending was nice and simple though. Keep trying!
@ Albert – Thanks for the input, Albert.
“The young toddler…”
As opposed to the old toddler?
@ Anon – Ooh, good catch
I owe you one. I’ll change it tonight.
This made me cry.
Julio Cortazar in English!
Quite excellent. I wish I had a more useful comment to make, but, well, there it is.
wow, that was amazing, what brilliant writing.
brought a tear to my eye.
Denise Webber´s last blog post..The Whole Of the Moon
@ Tac – Tis sad, yes. However, the ultimate aim is to glorify life. Most readers who read this are not like Steve. We have the advantage because our lives are limitless when compared to his.
@ Born in the 70’s – Never heard of it. Will look it up now. Who’s the author?
@ Pete – I appreciate even the nods.
@ Denise – Thank you.
[...] than 20% of all lifetime traffic for this blog has come in the last three days. Unbelievable. Playgrounds in the Night got utterly flattened, which is completely cool because hell, I liked [...]
Wow…
Is someone chopping onions up in here? Seems awfully dusty up around the eye socket all of a sudden.
Great story!
wow, it just rained here, but today seems like the perfect day to take my lil boy to the park. well done
@ Adam – Thank you Adam
@ erin –
[...] been extremely kind to me. Almost all of my short stories have done extremely well on StumbleUpon (Playgrounds in the Night got over 15,000 visits and is still going). In fact, the majority of my traffic has come from you. [...]
This is awesome. I couldn’t believe it was going to end so abruptly and so beautifully; It was a jolt of inspiration.
That is so amazingly beautiful. I can’t think of any other words to describe it.
That was the gayest thing I’ve ever read. It’s so clichéd and melodramatic that I thought it was going to be a joke, but instead it turned out to be a shitty “deep” short story. You should put this in a “Chicken Soup for the Soul” book, because those christfags eat this shit up.
You’re expecting us to believe a man has inoperable cancer that can literally kill him AT ANY MOMENT, and yet he doesn’t have any pain, can play with his child, hide this from his wife, etc.
Yeah. No.
Hey I liked it. I’m just guessing but it seemed that you started with the ending and tried to build to that end. Some of the writing is a little stiff, and the dialogue in the beginning is especially so, however the ending makes up for all of it. Keep on keepin’ on. Larry is just a /b/tard, the worst of the internet. Dominic Allen does have a point though.
yay for nice stories on stumble
I like the premise, although slightly cliched. It’s an effective take on it. However, I’d like to make some constructive criticism:
“Dusk was coming. The earth rolled away from the sun.”
I love the image. Love it. However, lose the passive… at least how it is here. Personally, the opening use of “dusk” brings darkness and suspense immediately to mind. I read the first sentence and immediately assumed I was reading some kind of horror story (I’ve never read your work before… I don’t know your genre). If you change the first sentence to “It was dusk” (and left the second sentence as is), it would make a wonderful second paragraph, used to establish setting. Here, it seems as though you are trying to establish a mood (hence my thinking it was a horror story). Perhaps open with your protagonist in some way? The story is about him, after all. (Think about Catcher in the Rye… although I hate the book, it has an all-time great opening… it’s all about the main character, who is the focus of the book, and it establishes both the style of the writing and the character himself.)
“Not right now, I have several things I have to do tonight, so we’ll have to do it tomorrow, or another day.”
You never illustrate what he has to do. Answer a phone call? It never seemed like much. You can come up with a better excuse (”I just don’t feel up to it today”).
““But why?” asked the boy, oblivious to the answer he had just received.”
Again, I like it.
“The man stood up, and walked over to the stairwell. Step by step he ascended. With each step he would reach forward, grabbing the railing in front of him, pulling on it until his foot had arrived at its new step, after which he would reach up and grab the railing again. At the top of the stairs, he turned to his right, as if on a slowly spinning merry-go-round.”
Extremely boring prose. I know how people walk up stairs, you don’t need to chronicle it. Doesn’t tell me about the character. Doesn’t further the story. Don’t need it. Ends with a (sorry) terrible simile.
“A drop could be heard bouncing on the bottom of the bathtub in the room to his left. The light in the hallway he was in was low, but it was brighter at the end, where his study’s door was partway open. A fuzzy cone of light spread down the hallway and across the walls. As he walked down the hallway, the cone became more narrow. He felt like he was getting smaller, that the hallway was shrinking as he advanced.”
I like the part about the bathtub (meant to show the banality of the day, the ordinariness, right? That’s how I took it). However, again the second half is somewhat boring prose. You can liven up the metaphor a bit. What is our character thinking? He must have some inkling of what the news on the other end of the line is… That’s why he feels small, correct? All this is unclear. Make me sympathize with the character a little more. As I read this, I personally hoped the phone call was not how what it ended up being. I was hoping, as I read this specific passage, there would be some apparent reason for his feeling small that was not the obvious (and I personally thought the rest of the story was obvious at this point).
“Steve, listen, it’s bad. The worst I’ve ever seen. It’s everywhere…it’s inoperable…”
We have no preparation for this, apart from the fact that it is somewhat cliche (a call from the doctor, the young children, the perfect wife… please, the only story to tell is a tragedy). The man does not feel bad in any way (he didn’t struggle up the stairs, he is making plans for the future); as far as we know, he is just a happy, normal guy.
“The earth was still rolling.”
I love the idea of the earth rolling. Great image, great way to show that life keeps moving, even for him.
Other thoughts that I can’t pick out in a single passage:
- His wife doesn’t inquire about a doctor’s late-night phone call?
- His thoughts about dying (regrets… his wife shaking him to wake him up, his son “becoming a man”, his daughter’s wedding) are all violently cliche. You look like a much better writer than this; this is just lazy. Come up with some real examples! Either that, or at least reference the cliche-ness.
- Make your characters deeper, right now they are perfect: This does not mean extend the story; you can quickly introduce a flaw to your protagonist (is he a workaholic, is that that why he does not have time to play with his son?) or show some kind of imperfect relationship (is he happy with his wife, has he hit a mid-life crisis? perhaps this episode can bring about a revelation about that…).
- The title gives away the rest of the story. As soon as the kids ask about the playground, I knew at some point it would return, and in a big way. A title says a lot (rhetorically) about your story. Like that first line, “Playgrounds in the Night” immediately sounds like a horror story. I don’t know what you want to call it, I just know that what you have currently doesn’t work.
All in all, I like it, but it is flawed. You can go a long way on that image of the earth rolling… it is fantastic. However, the main things I would do would be eliminate the boring prose and add depth to your characters.
You have a great twist on an old topic here; placing the entire “I only have x amount of time to live” plot (Man v. Mortality) within a single 15 minute episode. I’d like to see it with some deeper characters that I can really feel for.
Oh, one last thing upon rereading: It should be “the door of his study,” not “his study’s door.” You use the syntactic possessive (apostrophe s) with living things (as in, “Bob’s house,” or “the dog’s tail”), you use the periphrastic possessive (the of phrase) with inanimate objects (as in, “the leg of the chair,” or “the front of the car”).