DRAMATIC WORK

By Emma Watkins

A man stands among several play­sets. A play kitchen. A play school. A play vet­eri­nar­i­an. A play pizze­ria and food deliv­ery stand. None of them come above his waist. 

ARTHUR:

I make little worlds. I’m less inter­est­ed in big ones. Real kitchens gross me out—so many crumbs. But give me a little world, where the corners are all soft, where the oven dings when you open it, and dings when you close it. Give me that kind of kitchen. I could spend my whole day there.

I real­ized it was my life’s calling when my daugh­ter got her con­cus­sion. Crazy, I know, but hear me out. As an archi­tect of play, I operate by three metrics: grad­u­at­ed chal­lenges, entrap­ment and entan­gle­ment hazards, and crit­i­cal fall height. Crit­i­cal fall height being the most impor­tant, the height from above which a fall could result in a life-threat­en­ing head injury. I could do crit­i­cal fall height cal­cu­la­tions in my sleep. I could tell it just from looking, which play­grounds were designed before the imple­men­ta­tion of the guide­lines, and which play­grounds came after. I never let my daugh­ter any­where near the unsafe ones. They usually have metal slides anyway, which are a burn hazard, so …

But that day, I didn’t have time to drive her to the play­ground. I had a new com­mis­sion, for a dinosaur-themed addi­tion to a park in Port­land, and it was overdue. The thing I’d designed, the bron­tosaurus-back climb­ing feature, it had been retroac­tive­ly coated in this UV layer. Which made it slip­pery. So I was on the phone all day with the idiot who’d given the thumbs up on that one. She and her friends went one block over to the church and were hanging out on the ADA acces­si­ble ramp. They were just doing, you know, kid things. But the summer Olympics were hap­pen­ing, so that’s an impor­tant detail too. That explains why my daugh­ter was hanging upside down off the handrail, which is what she was doing when she fell.

She was in the hos­pi­tal for a week. She missed the first week of second grade. And at the time, we didn’t know for sure … right? When I went home during that week, I came back to get, I don’t know, food or like a book, for my wife, and people kept putting casseroles on our porch which was nice, except for the squir­rels. But before I drove back to the hos­pi­tal, I went to the church. I looked at the ramp. And I tried to assess the hard­ness of the sur­fac­ing mate­r­i­al, which was of course, in this case, cement. And I just tried to judge. Like, if I was able to deter­mine the crit­i­cal fall height, I would be able to predict if she was going to be OK.

That’s when I started making little worlds.

She came home and the first Tiny Tot pro­to­type was already par­tial­ly assem­bled in the garage. The first one was the Olympic set. It’s still one of our most popular models. It’s uneven bars, set over a geo­t­ex­tile filter cloth—one of the most shock absorbent mate­ri­als out there. And every time there was a shock, every time a kid landed a jump, a little speaker in the base would go, “And the crowd roars! Yaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

And for a while, that solved everything.

She wanted to cook in our kitchen, but there are so many oppor­tu­ni­ties for entan­gle­ment and entrap­ment there, so I made the Tiny Tot Kitchen. She wanted to know where I spent my day, so I made the Tiny Tot Office, and the Tiny Tot Class­room came around the same time. Two years ago, she asked where Uber Eats came from, so I made her a drive-through.

But last night I got a call from a school, an order for a dozen Tiny Tot Kitchen Deluxes, with microwave add-ons.

And I was like, great, great, yes, I’m on it.

And then they were like, oh, and one last thing.

And I was like, yes?

And they were like, can you make them bulletproof?

And I was like,  … Oh.

I told them I would price it out, that I would get back to them.

I stood up. I went out to the garage, where I was putting togeth­er a ship­ment of Tiny Tot Offices, and I sat down in the swivel­ing chair, which has a crit­i­cal fall height of 1.5 feet. And all around me, I saw my Tiny Tot Offices growing hard. All the corners sloughed off their soft­ness and the walls got dappled, the way walls do when mold is creep­ing in. Then I felt the bolts in the chair loosen under­neath me and I fell back­wards, and fifteen sharp­ened Ticon­dero­ga pencils tumbled down on me like por­cu­pine quills.

And I real­ized there was nothing, nothing at all, nothing in the world I could do to protect her.

END

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.

Photo by Tom Barrett.