The Boy Beneath the Playground.

The Boy Beneath the Playground.

There’s always that one kid you see in the playground, under the jungle gym, hiding from the rest of the kids. His clothes are a little crinkled, but never muddy. His face is always clean, but his tears make his cheeks shimmer. The sun shafts through the metal grating above him just right to make the little world where he’s sitting a sun-speckled paradise.

And he’s always crying. Well, sometimes he’s giggling to himself, or reading. But most of the time he’s crying. He makes you wonder…why? For just a moment, you want to be there with him. To stop the wondering, the crying, if anything.

But you never talk to him. Things are just like that.

Not today, though. A few feet behind you, your friends whisper and laugh and gossip, already drawing second-grade bets of chewing gum and bouncy balls over whether or not you’ll actually go through with it.

Sigh, shuffle. Shuffle, sigh.

You bend your head slightly so you don’t hit the grating and duck into the separate, secret, perfect, immaculate world that you’ve wanted to enter so many times before. He’s still crying, silently. You ask him; he blinks, his crying petering into sniffles.

Silence, for a moment, then he leans over.

“I’m invisible,” he whispers in your ear.

And for some strange reason, that makes you want to cry.