toys
I am sitting alone when the miracle happens and the toys begin to fall all around me in a gentle shower, falling slowly like snowflakes. They don’t hurt. They aren’t hard or sharp until they’ve splashed softly to the ground and then sprung back into the shape of an animal, a car, a balloon, a drum. I’m rolling in them and playing with them all at once somehow. Somehow I’m splashing crazy in this soft ocean that is each unique toy and all of them together all at the same time and the rain of toys keeps falling warm on my face and the waves of toys are growing and crashing into me knocking me down laughing into the sliding surf of toys, and the salty drops of toy go up my nose and down my throat and I can feel the toy flowing inside and outside of me all at the same time. I stand on shaky legs, excited to share this wonder with my friends, smiles happy when they see that it is raining and toys and the ocean of toy and the toy inside you. I begin to gather the toy together as if it were an ordinary pile of toys, as if there were such a thing as an ordinary pile of toys. I’m already forgetting the magic. I begin to gather them together like ordinary toys, still happy but growing tense now, impatient to get these toys to my friends, they aren’t so fun now they are more like the stupid old toys in my room, but I move my sweating little hands faster and faster clutching and grasping more and more, pulling them into my arms I am sweating and as I try to stand with my arms full, the ball slips out of my arms and bounces into the ebbing tide of toys, I bend over to grab it back up again and a soldier falls to the ground followed by the clatter of a train engine. Stupid toys and my teeth hard against each other my eyes burning I will get you still I am stubborn pick you up little soldier in my arms and train engine and ball and take you to my friends at once while the mast of a sailing ship stabs me in the arm when I turn and everything clatters to the ground my legs do too so that I’m sitting burning eyes on the hard basement floor and there’s no rain and the ocean seems so far away I can’t see it and there’s just stupid toys and the huge sobs, that ocean inside me, huge sobs exploding out of me, tossing me on to the concrete where the waves were, pounding my arms against the floor, huge and my breath is coming in short, great hiccoughs and then in a bit the huge sobs have passed through me and I am tired and lying on my side and the little soldier is lying, tiny like my pinky next to me on the ground, propped up on his elbows, he’s trying to get to my arm to crawl up to hide in the crevice of my elbow because he has to hide because otherwise the ball that’s rolling now on its own toward him will crush him and flatten the bones in his legs but the ball will be stopped even if he can’t get to my arm in time by his friends who are coming in the covered wagon drawn by snorting horses galloping madly like me with dust around them I think they will make it and stop the ball from flattening their friend come on come on my little soldier friend keeps bumping along on his elbows trying to make it but the ball is roaring like an ocean now come on little friend you can do it and then my friends big and little at the same time have leaped out of the covered wagon just before the ball roaring crashes into it just as the soldier makes it up onto my arm and the quiet whispering roar is the tide of the toy ocean laughing galloping up to grab my friends in a foamy finger and to toss us all into the air with the soldier and the wagon and the ball and I fall back on my back, scraping sand and salty in the scrape, but it doesn’t hurt except my stomach from laughing and swallowing so much toys and they are falling again, plunking in fat toy drops down into the swelling waves of toys.