Desert's Park

“On three,” He stood, holding the thinly coated chain-link fence, right at the point where it bowed open.

“Are you ready?”

I glanced in the direction of the overweight security guard, waddling along the opposite end of the parking lot. The enormous blue of the sky lit rows of cars in flames of silver and red. He progressed between them with labored steps, surveying every three cars or so for permits. He stopped, still. He pointed his face towards us, towards me.

I held my breath and froze, crouched, one leg dug under the fence.

The security guard sighed, then trudged on.

“He sees us!” I whisper-shrieked, sharp, shrill. “He sees us!”

“Ssssssh,” hissed Tyler. Then again, “On three.”

One.

Two.

Three.

In one motion I tore under, snagging a lime-green sleeve, the sleeve of my new lime-green zip-up on a spoke of metal. He pushed under and over.

"Go,go, go!” Tyler flew past me in a flash of cruddy sneakers and faded baseball cap. We’d been camping on the beach in a strange country for weeks, slipping past on watery shots in backpack bars and strange farmland. We had no more money.

Earlier that day, we chased a few wallabies and I stuck my head in a stuffed crocodile—the largest stuffed crocodile in the world, mind you—and snapped photos. An animal sanctuary was where we found ourselves balancing the weight of a very sleepy and stoned Koala in the crook of our arms, its black tapered claws digging delicately into our shirts and skin as we snapped even more. That was the last of our fruit-picking money, we were driving on fumes and the smell of meat-pies and bananas, the glimpse of a kangaroo corpse at the edge of the road, common as a deer in Connecticut, and the exhilaration knowing that we held our own lives in the palm of our nervous hands at every turn, and we could disappear forever in the red of the desert, and no one would ever know how we met our fates but us and possibly God.

This is why we climbed under the fence when we saw the cartoonish signs for the territory’s--(maybe even the entire country’s)--largest theme park, replete with fully functioning exotic zoo, roller coasters that broke every code for American safety standards, a sky-lift for miles on which one could gaze down and squint to see an untouched jungle to the south, low blue mountains to the west, and directly down a pack of dingos moving dangerously close to several babies and their incredibly brave, or incredibly nitwitted, parents.

We didn’t know which. Because to survive here, we had to be one or the other, and as we scraped our knees on the powdery dirt, partially hidden by a giant mango statue and a line of low shrubs, we simply didn't know which one.

Tomorrow, the rest…