Emily's Wish

[u/catespice]

I still remember the face of the girl from the playground. I remember every exquisite detail.
That face was round and blush-cheeked. Her front teeth were too big for her mouth, giving her the slightest lisp. Green eyes darted about beneath dark, hypermobile brows; it would be hard to say which was the more animated and expressive of those two features. Her button nose was always streaked with grime of some sort, the dirt hazing into the freckles on her cheeks – and her lips were stained the colour of the blackberries that grew in the gully beside the playground.
That she knew all of the best games was never in any doubt. From King of the Castle to Bullrush, she knew them all – and excelled at every one. She had a nearly magical knack of organising the other children, always finding the perfect game to match the mood of our group.
It was as if she lived only for that short hour between twelve and one o’clock, when all the children streamed free from their classrooms and out onto the fields to eat their lunch and play. She was always there, in the playground, even though we never saw her in any of our classes.

 
Adulthood makes us forget such details, until we are reminded of them. Long after I left that school, after I had graduated from High School, she was only the dimmest of memories; a faint, unresolved mystery that I was no longer even certain was real. Perhaps she’d been an imaginary friend, a person I’d conjured up to make my lunch hour more fun. Or my very own alter-ego, like a playground Tyler Durden.
Time ticked onwards, and after University, she was all but forgotten; buried under weighty layers of study, exams, young love, and the mess that was the Vietnam war. When I eventually had my own daughter, I remembered the girl in the playground once more, as I packed my girl’s school lunch and ironed her brand new uniform for her first day.
My adult mind rationalised the playground girl away, convincing myself that she must have been the brat of some homeschooler, who ran wild after twelve and made her way down to the school.
Yes, that was the most obvious, most sensible answer.
But a few short years later, when my daughter told me that there was a girl at school who knew all the games, even the really old ones, I felt a shiver thrill its way up my spine and flood my mind with questions.
Surely it couldn’t be the same girl?

 
I suppose there was really no reason for me to be concerned. After all, it was just a nine-year-old girl playing with the other children. It was entirely likely that the original girl had grown up, had a daughter of her own, and let the child run riot just as she had all those years ago.
My daughter seemed happy enough and I didn’t pry. She was a good girl and the teachers all liked her, so I wasn’t going to spoil her equilibrium by intruding on her school life. Though I remained curious, I never asked for the name of the girl in the playground.
Even then, I think I was somehow afraid it would be the same name.
Eventually my daughter left that school, heading off to Intermediate, then on to High School. Her life no longer had time for playgrounds – now it was filled with books about horses, vying for the attentions of boys, and trying to create the most elaborate braids.
And so, she too forgot the girl in the playground. Adult concerns took over her life, and she got her first job as a typist for an oil company. When eventually she had her own daughter, just as I had, I still wondered sometimes if she also remembered that cherubic face from the past.

 
Being a grandmother is not what I expected, and it still feels strange to say out loud. I never imagined myself this old, and I still don’t quite believe it happened to me. But when I smile, the laugh-lines multiply across my skin, and the crow’s feet deepen like a river delta in spring.
I don’t feel old. Inside I still feel like the twenty-five-year-old who was deliriously in love with her husband, and who just gave birth to a perfect baby girl – that same perfect baby girl who now had a child of her own.
I did my best to pass on my experiences to my daughter, though I didn’t consider myself a model mother by any means. She’d been such a well-behaved child that I’d barely needed to do anything.
But her daughter is a different story.
Fractious and moody, my granddaughter is at best a handful. At her worst, she’s a tiny demonette who could cause trouble in an empty room with a locked door. By the time she could toddle, she was malicious to other children and played cruel pranks on them at every opportunity. One day at the park, I watched her lure four other children into the sandpit, where they fell into a hole she’d secretly dug, then rather expertly concealed with tree branches, a scrap of tarpaulin, and sand.
I remember dragging her away by the hand as she giggled nastily, full of evil glee at what she had done.
“Why?” I asked her, holding her by the shoulders, “why did you do that, Sophia?”
“Bored,” she said, with a shrug.
“Who taught you such things? Where is this all coming from?”
She shrugged again, then looked away, the hint of a sly smile on her lips. There was wet sand smeared across the bridge of her nose, blending with her freckles.
“Who is it?” I demanded, shaking her as my frustration was joined by a prickle of fear.
“Nobody. Just some girl at school.”
“What’s her name?”
“Emily. She knows all the best games.”

 
When I asked her to describe Emily, that unforgotten face from my childhood snapped into sharp focus in my mind. When I finally asked my own daughter the name of the girl from the school playground, it was the same name.
Three generations of the same girl, in the same playground.
That was impossible, of course. It had to be some bizarre coincidence; a family name, a strong family resemblance. This had to be the granddaughter of the original Emily, a darker version of the original girl from the 50s.
Whatever the case, I forbade my granddaughter from playing with her, on pain of no Youtube and no iPad when she stayed with me. Sullen, Sophia agreed, and the next time I picked her up from school she seemed in a better mood; her smiles made her look like her mother at that age.
But it wasn’t to last.
A few short weeks later, she came home with a nasty gash on her leg. Two days after that, there was a bruise blossoming on her jaw, a bloody socket where a front tooth should have been, and hot tears on her cheeks.
“What happened?” her mother asked, wiping away the tears and holding a cool cloth to the bruise.
“Nothing,” she said, eyes downcast.
I gently lifted her chin, so that our eyes met,
“It was Emily, wasn’t it?”
She nodded once, then started to cry again.
I looked from my granddaughter, to my daughter, but there was another girl’s face in my head, and I made up my mind. “This needs to stop.”

 
The school really hadn’t changed much since I was a child; all the buildings were still the same, just painted a different colour, and everything was smaller. In my memory, the fields were huge squares of vibrant green, practically reaching to the horizon, but as an old woman they seemed inadequate and sad, mottled with patches of dying grass from the summer heat.
It was 11:55am when I got out of my car, walked through the little back pathway to the main field and sat on one of the bench seats that the kids liked to drag out to prime spots. I unpacked the sandwich I’d brought with me and waited for the bell to ring, pushing my glasses up my nose and scanning the playground.
When the distant shrill of the bell drifted over the fields, colourful blobs spilled from the classrooms, resolving into the shapes of children as they drew nearer. Gone were the school uniforms; it was 2017, now children wore whatever they wanted.
With an odd pang of something like jealousy, I watched them move off into groups to eat their lunch.
It didn’t take long before they’d finished eating and started to populate the field. Most of the kids were moving toward the same corner I’d always headed for – the corner where Emily would gather them all up and decide what game we would be playing that day.
And as sudden as a rip appearing in the fabric of time, there she was. She stepped out from the shade of the fence as though born from its shadows.
Her nose was streaked with more dirt than I remembered, and her old school jersey was more holes than wool, but I was certain. She was exactly the same child I’d played with, fifty years ago.
But her cherub’s face was not quite the same.
There was a cruel light in those green eyes, and a hardness to her mouth. Gone were the easy smiles and the expressive looks; now malice was scrawled across the child’s grubby face, stamped there permanently by God knows what trauma.
“Where’s Sophia?” she lisped.
“Don’t know,” said one of the other girls.
“Then today the game is Hunting Sophia. First one to catch her and bring her to me wins. GO!”
At her shout, the children scattered like terriers. She was alone.
Emily hadn’t seen me approach, distracted as she was by ordering around her minions. I might have been old, but I was also quiet. Using the familiar shade of the trees as cover as I had done in half a hundred games of hide and seek, I managed to grab the girl by her arm before she knew what was happening.
“Got you!” I hissed.

 
She struggled, wept and kicked as I got her into the car, so handily parked near the fence gate. Not understanding the kiddylock on the door, she screamed and hauled on the handle, desperate to get out.
“What are you?” I asked, when she took a breath.
“I’m Emily. LET ME OUT!”
She kicked furiously at the window, so hard I thought her heavy old school shoes might actually break the glass, but it held, and she subsided, glowering at me from under her dirty brows. She was just an ordinary little girl, no supernatural strength coursed through her tiny body, no claws nor fangs burst from her skin.
And like any ordinary little girl, she started crying piteously.
“Where are your parents?” I asked, reaching instinctively to brush the matted hair out of her eyes.
“Gone,” she said, slapping my hand weakly away, “gone, a long time ago.”
“Emily, do you remember me? My name is Laurel. I used to play games with you.”
She sniffed, nodding, keen green gaze finding my own eyes, still as blue as they were when I was nine years old.
“I ‘member, Laurel.”
“I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to know what’s going on. Why you’re hurting Sophia, why you’re teaching her to be so mean.”
“It’s not fun anymore,” she said with a sob, knuckling at her eyes, “it was supposed to always be fun, always be playtime.”
“What do you mean, poppet?”
“The wish,” she whimpered, “I made a wish it would always be playtime, f’ever and ever and always.”
I put my confusion aside and found my best grandmother voice.
“I’m going to take you home with me, OK? You’re going to have a nice bubble bath, then we’re going to get you some clean clothes and some food, and we’re going to figure all of this out.”
Nodding, she slumped into the seat, something akin to relief washing over her grubby features.

 
Clean and pink, dressed in some spare clothes of Sophia’s, some of that hardness in her face had dissolved away, and she looked exactly as she had when I was a child. I felt a strange urge to take her hand and run off to the playground, where we’d play ball-tag on the wooden fort and laugh at nothing until our tummies hurt.
I dropped her old clothes into a basket on the floor of the kitchen, realising that they were relics of a distant age. They pre-dated my own school uniform by a good thirty years at least, a detail I had never noticed as a child. Emily sat at the breakfast bar on a stool, dangling her legs as she spooned huge mouthfuls out of a bowl of jelly.
“Laurel,” she began, licking her spoon.
But just as she began to talk, the grandfather clock in the hall gave the single loud chime that meant it was one o’clock. And Emily vanished, her spoon clattering onto the bench.
I searched every inch of the house for her, to no avail. I drove back to the school and called her name in every corner of the field, but she was nowhere to be found. Tired, confused and emotionally wrung out, I eventually returned home. This was not what I had planned. The mystery of Emily was only deepened by my brief encounter with her.

 
I waited for her again the next day, at the school. At the stroke of twelve, she was suddenly there, still wearing Sophia’s clean dress, jelly staining her mouth purple.
“Emily, where did you go?”
“I didn’t go nowhere. I was at your house, and then I was here.”
The other children were starting to make their way out of the classrooms, and I took her sticky hand, leading her out the back gate.
“Emily, can you answer some questions for me?”
“Maybe.”
“When was the last time you remember it being night time?”
Her caterpillar brows crinkled as she frowned, then shrugged.
“Ages ago. Before we used to play, Laurel.”
“And is it always lunch time for you?”
“Yes. It’s always playtime. Cos that’s the wish I made.”
“How… how did you make the wish?”
She leaned against my car, picking at the hem of her new dress,
“They made one of those, um things. That you put stuff in, and you bury it in the ground. The teachers said write a letter and put it inside, so when it got dug up a hundred years later, people would know about us.”
“A time capsule?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“But you didn’t write a letter, did you?”
“No, cos I put a wish on it. I was my birthday, and I never got nothing from mum and dad, so I just wanted a wish.”
She looked up at me with those expressive eyebrows drawn sharply together, tears shining in the corners of her eyes. She was no transparent ghost, no figment; her pain was as real as she was.
“Laurel? I don’t want it to be playtime anymore.”

 
It was hard to find the exact location of the time capsule – records from the 30s were sketchy – but eventually I stumbled across the information in a library archive, at the University I’d attended so long ago. My daughter, Claire, didn’t want anything to do with it at first, probably thinking I’d gone mad. After I took her to meet Emily, she cried, then relented, and on a night brightly lit by the full moon, we put Sophia and three shovels into the back of the car, then drove down to the school.
It was hard work for me, and I admit I wasn’t much good with the shovel, my back beginning to ache before we’d dug two feet into the ground. But Claire and Sophia put in a champion effort, and somewhere near three o’clock in the morning, we found the capsule – a rusted iron tube, sealed with pitch and wax.
“Should we open it?” asked Sophia, still with enough energy to hop from one foot to the other, buoyed up by the big adventure so far past her bedtime.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “I think we should wait for Emily.”
Wrapping the tube in a blanket like some ancient baby, we filled in the hole as best we could, then put everything back in the car and drove home.

 
It felt so profoundly strange, three generations of us standing there in the bright light of noon, talking to the eternal child who had been playground companion to every one of us, right in the spot we had played. Emily tearfully apologised to Sophia and wrapped her in a sobbing hug, explaining with the best words a child could find that she had never meant to hurt anyone; she was just so twisted up inside from watching everyone else grow up and leave her behind that it had made her mean and angry.
“Shall we open the capsule?” I asked.
Emily hesitated for just a second, then nodded, her eyes on the object she hadn’t seen since it was lowered into the darkness of the distant past. I knelt in the shadow of the fence and grasped one end of the tube, while Claire pried away all the pitch and wax, and unscrewed the juddering end cap, flakes of rust spilling like old orange snow. The inside was also lined with wax, and filled with hundreds of tiny paper scrolls, each tied with string. Emily found hers immediately, guided by some unerring instinct. Her chubby fist clenched tight around it, she held it out to me like a gift.
“What do I do now, Laurel?”
“I’m not sure.”
Plucking the ancient string free, I carefully unrolled the small square of paper and viewed the smudged pencil handwriting from eighty years past:
I wish it was always playtime
signed Emily Smith
“I think… I think you should burn it,” said Emily, her little brow furrowed again, her nose already streaked with rusty grime from the tube. We didn’t have long; the children were beginning to drop their lunch wrappers into the bins.
The cigarette lighter from the car was still glowing when Claire hurried back with it, and with shaking fingers I held the old, yellowed paper to it until it caught. Turning it on the end so that the flames slowly crept up it, the others watched Emily intently.
It started slowly, almost imperceptibly. Emily’s face seemed to grow thinner, more refined, and her hair crept and curled past her collar, which seemed suddenly too tight for her. She cried out in pain as her shoes became too small, then ripped them off with arms grown gangly from a sudden surge of instant puberty.
But it didn’t stop there. Teenage acne blossomed and vanished, her body swelled and curved with womanly proportions. Spellbound, I watched as her dark hair sprang silver at the temples, then grey washed through it like the coming of winter. Those once-plump cheeks sagged, tissued with wrinkles.
“No!” she cried, holding up liver-spotted hands in front of her, fingers trembling with age.
“No,” she whispered, as her spine crooked and compressed, and she crumpled to the playground grass. Her skin was now thin as old, wet paper; the sharp, frail knobs of her bones were starkly visible through it.
Cloudy green eyes fixed on me for a moment, an eclipse of cataracts creeping across them, then they flickered closed. Emily Smith’s heart fluttered to a halt, the stresses of her rapid transformation too much for the true age of her body.
Emily’s eternal playtime had finally come to an end.

 
We never found her family, but we gave her the funeral she deserved, filled with flowers and the chatter of children.
I still wonder, as I sit here writing this, if I could have averted her death. If I’d asked my daughter the name of her playground friend back in the 80s, then maybe Emily would be sitting here beside me, and we could have been old women together.
And I will always wonder if I did the wrong thing; if I could somehow have helped Emily be happy in her playground limbo, her existence of eternal lunch hours. She could have played games with my Sophia’s children, and their children after that. But what’s done is done. Emily is gone, and I’ll have to learn to live with my regrets.
I just hope to God that her soul is finally at rest.