A playground. Some slides and a swing and a pit with more sand than glass in because the high school’s on the other side of town and a jungle gym with monkey bars that’s claimed more young lives than dengue fever.
Some shoes. They’re sneakers that scuff at every step, with the heel running down and the tongue curling up and a less-than-friendly ceasefire brought on by the threat of the Velcro coming apart at the seams.
Negotiating the space between those two objects was Jen. She’d doing pretty good that day and had only scabbed her knee three times when a slightly larger kid (there were lots of those) had bumped her out of the way because that was his favourite swing so tough luck.
So Jen left the playground and wandered around the scabby stone and crud at the edge of the school where the grass sulked and the trees turned up their noses and she kicked little rocks back and forth, which was strangely satisfying to her even if they were much too small and slender to be called proper rocks. Flakes, more like.
Kick, fwik. Kick, fwik. Kick, fwik. Kick fwik thump ouch.
“Sorry,” said Jen.
“You aren’t,” said the irritable-looking woman. She was short and grey and dusty and aiding in all of those things were the two big sacks of stones she had slung over her back. A band ran from them across her forehead, stretching the weight into her spine. “You really aren’t.”
Jen shrugged.
“Kids,” the woman muttered. She turned around and continued doing what she was doing. Jen was bored enough to get interested in this, and said so.
“I’m picking up flint,” she snapped. “Now bug off, you’re standing on it.”
“What’s flint?”
“This.” The stone Jen had kicked was returned to her, pointy-end first.
“It’s a rock.”
“Yeah, smart kid. You know a rock when you see one.”
Jen squinted at her. “You’re being sarcastic. That’s original.”
“Smart-assed kid.”
“Why’re you picking up flint?”
“Because SOMEONE’s got to do it. Certainly not ‘cause I like it. My back is killing me.”
Jen looked at her back. It reminded her of her great-grandmother’s: parts of it were fighting over which direction to grow in.
“Could you stop?”
“Just said: someone has to do it.”
“I’m bored. I’ll do it.”
The irritable-looking woman turned back around to face Jen and hummed to herself a bit as she thought.
“Sure,” she said. “Why the hell not?” And she dropped the bags in the dirt – bam – just like that – bam – and she dusted the rock dust off her palms and started walking towards the road, still-hunched.
“What do I do with them?” called Jen.
“Just wedge ‘em somewhere. And don’t stop.”
And with that, she was gone.
That was an exciting sort of recess.
The next day, it was a way to kill time during recess.
The day after that, it was a chore, and one without a clear end. There was a lot of flint up in those cliffs around the edge of town. A lot of it. And Jen had already gotten yelled at by her mom for putting her clothes in the washing machine without emptying her pockets of flint first.
“This house,” she said, “is no place for rocks.”
“Flint.”
“It’s a rock.”
So by the fourth day Jen wandered at the very edge of the playground looking at the entirely empty swingset in front of her and kicking whatever rocks came nearest to her shoe.
“That’s my favourite swing,” said a slightly larger kid. “Don’t take it.”
“I’m busy,” she said. “Busy picking up flint.”
“What’s flint?”
Jen kicked some at her.
“That’s a rock.”
“Wow, so smart.”
“That’s sarcasm and that’s rude. And that’s BORING. Why are you picking up boring rocks, are you boring? A baby could pick up rocks.”
“I’m picking up the right kind of rocks and I’m picking them up fast and I have to find them,” said Jen. “It’s a job. A grownup told me I had to do it for them, and I am. A big fat stupid baby couldn’t do it.”
The slightly larger kid gave her a look at this. “It’s easy.”
“Is not.”
“I’ll prove it.”
“Will not.”
And for the rest of recess they both failed to prove it.
The next day they tried harder, and some of the other kids came over to check it out.
The day after that the swings were empty, and by the end of the week the slide followed suit. The jungle gym was last of all.
Jen was still the best at picking up fling. She had practice, after all. And for a while there was a sort of rhythm and peace to the class that hadn’t existed before, aside from the odd bit of griping over who reached for what first and a single quickly-cancelled gravel fight.
This state of affairs did not go unnoticed for long.
Your child has been sent home from school because they refused to remove the rocks from their desk.
Your child has been sent home from school because they refused to remove the rocks from their locker.
Your child has been sent home from school because they refused to stop flicking small rocks from their desk at the class turtle.
Your child has been sent home from school because they are overly fixated on rocks and neglected the lesson to play with rocks they had hidden inside their desk.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
And the natural conclusion was reached fairly rapidly after this, wherein a large chain-mesh fence was erected around the playground. Sand, glass, slides and swings on one side (plus kids); flint on the other (minus kids). Neat and tidy and addition simple enough for anyone.
Most of them got over it. Jen wouldn’t stop yelling for days. By next week it was old, old news. Just like the flint. Which became new news the week AFTER that, when it came up through the basement of Jen’s house.
“Well,” said Jen’s mother, looking up at the sheer-sided pinnacle that had erupted through their living room and up past their roof. “That’s a thing you don’t see every day except today.” She looked to her daughter. “I DID say this house was no place for rocks, you know.”
“It’s flint.”
“It’s a rock. Don’t be pedantic.”
“Sorrrr—eee.”
They looked around the neighbourhood.
“Well,” said Jen’s mother, “at least we won’t stick out.”
What a mess. Flint spires rocketing up from under your floorboards. Flint blowing in drifts of chips and bits across the highway and causing pileups. The sanitation, postal, fire, police, and legal departments were all mobilized but their cars kept hitting flint jutting through the asphalt streets and their cell phones couldn’t get decent reception because all the towers had been battered by airblown flint and half the town had no internet because of flint eruptions knocking down telephone poles. Flint was everywhere all the time now: clogging the taps and the drains and the sewers and making click-clack-SMAK noises on the windows at night when the wind got frisky.
After a few days the sound on Jen’s window started swearing at her too, and she popped it open.
“You SAID you’d do it for me,” said the irritable-looking woman, who besides looking more furious than not now also had a pretty good tan.
“I did,” said Jen defensively. “I did a real good job. It’s just that everyone told me to stop. And they put a fence up, anyways.”
“Shiiiiiiiiiiii. Tuh,” enunciated the woman with unnecessary force and spit. “Damnit kid, why did I listen to you?”
“Why did I listen to YOU?” asked Jen.
The woman waved a hand. “You’re little, you’ll listen to anyone. Now follow me.”
So they walked out to the schoolyard, the woman and Jen. They ran into rough spots a few times but the woman would just reach out and pick up the flint and slip it into a little purse she was holding.
“Found it while I was out,” she said. “Easier on the back.”
Jen thought it was a bit silly to put ten-ton slabs of flint into a purse that could barely hold a can of tuna, but it seemed to be working okay so she just nodded.
By and again and by and by they came down to the schoolyard, and oh man was that place a mess. A big sherd had come up at big speed. The swingsets were okay but most of the sand was missing and the slide had been shot into Quebec. The flint cliffs loomed over it, glowering like fat tabbies.
“Now look what you’ve fucked up,” said the woman to Jen.
“Language.”
“Now look what you’ve screwed up,” said the woman to Jen in an overly patient voice. Then, absently, “you fucker.” She waved a hand at the playground. “I mean, SHIT. All you had to do was pick it up, right? I told you that, right? Not so hard, right?”
“I said I was sorry.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Sorry.”
“That doesn’t count, it’s too late.” She scratched herself a bit and hummed some more.
Jen kicked at a rock. It seemed to move more sullenly than usual, and she resented it for it. Stupid rocks. Flint. Whatever.
“Right,” said the woman. “That’s it. C’mere.”
Jen c’mered before she thought to ask, and was picked up and thrown like a discus. When the world stopped spinning she was sitting on top of the cliff with one leg and both arms and all of her chin bar the edge, the rest was sort of flailing around in midair.
“You good?”
“I’m good. What do I do?”
The woman pointed down at her foot. “Kick.”
So Jen looked down at her foot somewhere inside the sneaker and she looked at the flint cliff and she looked at the playground the cliff had filled with its spare flint and she felt a lot of glowing, red-spicy pepper bubbling up through her body in all the veins and organs and limbs which she immediately put into work running her right leg as firmly as she could swing it.
whack
“This”
Whack
“Is”
WHACK
“No”
WHACK!
“PLACEFORROCKS!”
And with that one last WHACK!! still wobbling through it, the cliff gave up, gave in, and chipped off at full speed, shooting over the town a little faster than a speeding car and startling a lot of birds.
All that was left behind by the time anyone else got there were flakes.
Jen was still pretty dizzy when the woman found her later, tangled in a tree just outside of town.
“Good job,” she said. “You fucker,” she added.
“Language,” said Jen. Then she threw up.
The woman waited politely until she was finished.
“Ikpth,” said Jen.
“Yeah, yeah. Tough life. Look, your recovery was good, kid, but your work ethic is crap. Go to school, keep your head down, graduate, okay? And learn a little fuckin’ perseverance.” She reached out, grabbed Jen’s hand, and shook it before Jen could muster the hand-eye coordination to stop. “Look me up when you’re out and about and have your head in one piece, and we’ll see what we can do.”
And she slung her purse over her shoulder and walked off towards the road.
Jen was halfway home before she looked at her palm again, to see what was making it sting.
It was a little flint flake. With a sneaker-print smacked right into it.