Desert's Park (cont.)

My feet pounded heavy into the soft earth, the ground below me giving with each staccatoed step.

Run.

My lungs, wailing a tight protest with each breath, felt in my throat and in my head.

Tyler jumped a painted Cuckaburra exhibit sign as though it was an Olympic hurdle, his left arm outstretched, pointing, indicating a change of direction.

“There!” He bounded up a mulch mound with me at his heels. I trailed close, one arm gingerly touching my sleeve at its tear; my other arm flapping at the elbow, smacking me in the ribs as I investigated the damage.

At my back, the chain link fence faded distant, before me was a service shed, a loud generator buzzed unhappily, the surface dusty with the dirt of August, spitting flecks of wood and rock from the reverberating flat-top.

All clear.

No workers in view as we leapt, spinging high, over the tracks of a children’s train ride. Twenty yards ahead, the red caboose chugged away, and a young boy with a face-full of spun sugar turned, maybe at a single, passing curiosity to peek a glance behind him, and seeing us, let out a hollering yell. And pointed.

Run.

Still, the trees kept us clear, impervious to onlookers. The trees, gnarled like old men’s joints--(the kinds of trees witches’ caldrons are stirred under in nightmares)-- reached their arthritic, distorted branches to the cloudless sky, partially blocking the lift’s view.

But we had to go beyond the cover, a distant dog bark was a slap reminder that we were breaking and entering a theme park in a country further away than any other from home.

The lift’s cables were directly over Tyler and me, all the cars passed, us in their direct sights. The people above in the glass could gaze upon from many feet away, watching our desperate scramble through the manicured landscape, hiding quick in piles of dirt and behind strategically placed stones, scaling over and under lesser fences past the animals, the flavored ice stands, the cars hanging heavy on the line, ascending higher and higher the closer they came to us. Which meant…

“The skylift!” I managed, the words gasped lilted. We shot forward, now slapping sneakers on stucco, our floppy rubber soles whapping loudly. The cartoon maps on wood posts with bubbled arrows led our hopes and our legs. "Keep going!"

At once, the skylift’s entrance in front, directly in front, a steel oasis, beckoning to us, with a bored operator at its helm, perched on a stool, picking his teeth. If we could just get to it, we could hop on, zip through the sky to the other end of the park.

No one, no matter how smart, or how fast, could ever catch us. If we could just run fast, far, free. If only we could get to it in time, before the bored operator raised his slack-jawed face to greet us, before the people in line we needed to cut could protest, before the owner of the dog or the security guard in the lot or any number of hidden cameras around the park realized what we had done.

Run.