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A Boy at McDonalds
Once I met a brown boy on the McDonalds playland
He smiled a mouthful of gold teeth
I asked him where were his white teeth
He turned away and didn’t answer
We crawled away and slid down red plastic slides.
They called me the playground fraidy-cat back then
Scared of falling down where I couldn’t see
Scared of ladders, scared of strange kids.
(If my eyes fell out and turned to gold
Would people see me shine brighter than the sun?)
They were hard years
I was never more ashamed—
My autistic brother made trouble on the McDonalds’ slides
So they closed the building to strange mamas
Who sighed and slammed car doors
Going to their playground playdates to escape our family.
We he got into his teens, he did worse
We couldn’t take him anywhere, even enclosed spaces
My memories of him fall away and leave only eerie music.
Only my brother could figure out how to penetrate
The cloth string netting on the McDonalds’ playland
Where he could watch the squirming kids’ shadows
Wriggle down the slides and disappear upside down.
Only my brother could think of so many escapes
Deprived of his chicken Mcnuggets and chocolate cones
Still I remember…
Once, when I was five,
Traveling to Hannover, Indiana, to visit my Baba’s house
We stopped at the night McDonalds playland, my brother clutching his toys
My tired mother sat watching us
Talking to a lady with small children
Like strangers didn’t exist in the world
As the night closed in
She was contemplating the miles traveled behind us
And many more miles left to go.
I climbed into the slide,
Pretending I didn’t hear
Fragile beauty opening above us and inside us
Sticky as feet
Tender as hands.
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This is basically the story of my life.