Rite of Passage

    erintrude wrona

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      When she was seven years old she scootered to the park in the neighborhood over. The one from her sixth birthday party with the giant purple jungle gym. That morning her father caught her clubbing a beetle to death with a tennis racket and whisked her inside the house to inspect her hands for bruises and ask what business a little girl had with tennis rackets or bugs in the first place? Little boys kill with bugs, little girls play pianos or eat sweets or make the dolls crafted in their likeness play piano and eat sweets.

      The park was almost a mile out, just far enough beyond the reach of her father. She brought a pack of skittles and a thermos of fruit punch for sustenance, a word she learned in school earlier that week when Ms. Fitz’s class fish died because Monica Sylvester forgot to feed it for two and a half weeks. Not just food, but a pillow. Not just food and a pillow but she also brought a blanket and the tennis racket she used to kill the bug just in case some former boy scout came around looking for trouble. And if a standoff ensued she’d remember her father’s words, all the ways he’d taught her to be a porcelain doll and she’d do the opposite. In the wild of the playground she’d be like the boys at her elementary school, on their hands and knees, not caring about the dirt on their slacks, digging through the cracks of the sidewalk. She thought they’d been looking for broken glass bottle pieces to stick each other with, but maybe they’d been hunting for manhood in the form of a dung beetle to squish in their bare hands and swallow whole.

      The park was much bigger than when her father took her. He never let go of her hand, told her to not get dirty or scratch up her elbows or go within a foot of the monkey bars. Now, she looked at the jungle gym, and space ship, and monkey bars, and the woods behind it all like they were hers for the taking. They scared her some – their greatness, their solidarity. The moon glinted off the steel of the slide. Scared as she was, she started like she had to prove herself. So she played on every goddamn swing. She went down the slide seventeen times and ran back up it the opposite way. She went across the monkey bars, fell, started again, fell, and started again. It was already dark and then it got darker. Some kid left a soccer ball on the basketball court and she kicked that around until just before dawn. She imagined her father’s horrified face like a day dream. This was the latest she’d ever been out, but her father was nowhere around, the lights of the Jetta didn’t catch her, surprised and ready to run. She thought he might never notice, remain convinced his small daughter was asleep in her bed like a good little girl. Instead she picked up her tennis racket and hit the basketball pole like a gong. The sound vibrated away from her and she swung again and again, making her mark on the night, not worried about who she disturbed or what a little girl should be doing at this hour. Living instead like a lost boy, a stranded cat, an animal no longer loved.

      On the second day the park seemed smaller than it ever had before, but maybe she just felt bigger. The green bench held her pillow and the empty bag of skittles she finished the night she arrived. The third day she slept straight through the morning. Week two found her sleeping by day and waking at night to hunt for scraps of Taco Bell and half empty bags of pretzels resting in the garbage can. The twenty-fifth morning there had been nothing, not even a few displaced potato chips in the mulch below the monkey bars. Giving up the hunt for food, she swung from bar to bar like a pro, like she’d always had it inside of her. Somewhere in the second month she stopped counting days. She’d been there a long time when she felt fully awake beneath the moonlight and got on all fours, scouring the ground for a small rodent or insect that she could eat from her mud covered fingertips. She had learned to trust her touch, follow her impulse. After an hour of search she chewed on thick beetles, too hungry to continue for something more substantial, rabbit or squirrel. She looked off into the woods, then at the moon. Even when the Skittles ran dry, there was no regret, no need to turn around and scooter right back to her father. Some feral hunger had torn a hole in her stomach and the wild had finally begun to mend it somehow, like second skin placed on her guts, like she was a whole person for the first time. With this thought she howled at the moon, gave life to the dog inside of her. Beetles and ants in her stomach, she went into the woods, a rite of passage. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but when she found it, she’d take it.