Flash Fiction 1st Place: That Place Where Unimaginable Things Are Real by Kelly Railton

Tom sits on the park bench, a bottle tucked into the fraying inside pocket of his denim jacket. Every now and then, when the walkers, joggers and bike riders get out of view, he ferrets it out and takes a sip, wincing. He stays like that for hours, with nothing and no one left to return to.

The park’s playground is mostly unused now. The roundabout’s rusted and the faded saddle of the wooden horse is riderless. A couple with a toddler approach, but they don’t open the gate to the playground. Instead, the father picks the boy up, quickens his pace and says to the mother, “You can’t even begin to imagine…” and Tom wonders if he’s talking about him with his bottle, or what happened there last year. Not that the two things are any different.

As the hours go on, the drink gets lower, and the playground gets hazy, more like that morning. Usually, he managed to stay off the drink for the twelve hours he had Bella each week, but on that day he’d started early, opening the whiskey before his ex-wife had dropped her at his. He’d been laid off from work the night before and they hadn’t even looked directly at him when they gave him the news. They’d said it was nothing personal, just a first-in, first-out kind of situation.

If he squints, he can still Bella on the swing, shouting for his attention, “Daddy, look!” He can just about hear her squealing, which he’d thought was down to one of the older kids pushing her higher, and he can smell the freshly cut grass, tinged with the taste of cheap whiskey.

The haze lifts and there it is, that same old thudding of his heart.

Where is she?

He flings his bottle to the grass and runs in the darkness to the swings, the roundabout, the wooden horse. Turning in circles, he howls out her name to the night sky. There are cracks in his vision where that day encroaches into this one. It’s too real to be a memory. Crystal clear. Him, drunk in the middle of a children’s playground, screaming out Bella’s name. Bella somewhere, he still doesn’t know where. And the other parents wide-eyed, walking fast, scooping up their children and holding them close to their chests.