It was autumn, a few months into the first semester at Prairie Woods Nursery. The rich, maple’d winds flung ruby leaves from skinny maples.
The children were out. They rang around the rosy and tossed about flying balls and leapt into each other’s arms and laugh-cried. They jumped into piles of shallow leaves, they slid onto tiny plastic Huffies and revved up, revved down. In their Own Worlds, they created and imagined, dreamed wild fantasies of pirates and princes and elfin journeys up high-tipped mountains. They painted Worlds and pushed away nasty truths like Mama never picked them up on time or Daddy was always seen Off with Some Woman. They played by themselves at first, then things got lonely. Too lonely.
So they stuck in friend-clusters, they shook hands and then, at some point they wondered, wondered about the Other Worlds where kids bounced and played differently. They started reaching for each other’s Worlds, crushing into them, complimenting them, they transform into a flailing princess in One World, a monster in the next.
A little girl in the corner gets quiet. She doesn’t speak out as much as the other children and wonders if anybody will see her World. Wouldn’t that be too good to be true? That another child would enjoy the way she can make a frog laugh or she can color a horse or ride a rainbow. For a little while, she waits, waits, and she finds herself passed over by the other children. Finally, finally, just as the sun is flattening over a bloom of purple evening cloud, she sees another child approach. The child enters her World easily, is fascinated by how she colors that horse and that child rides the rainbow too. The girl becomes joyous beyond belief, and she forgets about the children who pass her by, who are finding their own Worlds to love, who are painting their own animals with their baby minds.
As more and more children come to say hello to her World, she remembers how lonely things could get and she wants to reach for them all and bring them to her chest and tell her how lonely things got. So she says the small things that bring little smiles and while they are playing, she bends a flower petal with her baby mind. Despite the clamor of happy voices, she knows the way she bent that flower was reserved only for her.
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Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, When Trying to Return Home, Kinds of Grace and Neon Steel (2/26) She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Must-Read by Bookshop, Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine and Southern Review of Books. She is fiction editor at Pleiades and an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.