Sudetenland Tales by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Sudetenland Tales

Page 265

forgotten recital hall. She hadn’t seen it when they first arrived.

“Did you plant that?” she asked Jax, who was halfway up the slide pretending to conduct an imaginary orchestra of crows.

He shook his head solemnly. “It just ...... appeared.”

Beneath the slide, they uncovered more; cracked vinyl records embedded in the mulch, guitar strings dangling from the monkey bars, even a mural on the back of the swing set depicting an old band; The Feathered Hour, performing in a field of clouds.

The conflict began when Jax tried to climb into one of the cloud paint swings. The moment he sat, he was weightless, drifting slowly upward; not high, just hovering, like the playground had begun rewriting the laws of gravity in service of their dreams.

Mara panicked. “Don’t you remember what happened the last time we chased that feeling? We almost tore each other apart.”

But Jax looked serene. “Maybe this time, we let it carry us without steering. Maybe we stop trying to turn magic into a set list.”

The wind picked up. Leaves swirled like confetti. Somewhere, faintly, a piano played. The group laughed.