Plastic Throat
HJ Dutton
No matter how long they searched, they couldn’t find her. Parents crowded around the slide, the one which, after a few seconds, should have disgorged the girl. Except it hadn’t. For hours parents and police combed the park, a dozen of them clambering through the slide, expecting her to somehow reappear. Her mother screamed. Screamed at the cops. Screamed at everyone. But there was nothing they could do.
Some passersby joined in the search, but one by one they left. Left those who lingered with an empty playground and a breaking mother. A job for the police, not them. Come sundown, the few parents left had gone home. They couldn’t bear to listen to the mother any longer. She cursed them, needing someone, anyone, to blame.
The father still visits the playground. Among staring children he goes, again and again, down the slide. Between plunges, he perches at its mouth and shouts into its plastic throat for whatever took his baby to give her back or goddammit have the decency to take him too. Nothing answers.
HJ Dutton is a PA-based writer featured in Horrific Scribes and the Creepy podcast.