I could just see them pushing their strollers around the park. And both with scarves tied around their heads. With hairdos.
“We used to play chase,” Kijra said after a long pause. She was looking at her fingernails when she said this. Staring off into the distance at them, and they were painted an ugly blue.
“Chase?”
“Yea,” she said, and she was smiling, “Chase. You chased each other around a grave yard. You touched a gravestone and then ran away and you were it. So when you touched someone else they had to run and touch that gravestone.”
It was the graveyard on Algoma I pictured, with dead leaves kicked up and swirling behind the wrought iron gates. Second graders, I pictured them, or third. And I didn’t say anything more about it.
And Kijra was still smiling, still looking at her fingernails, lost in them.
I sat for a while staring out the window at the trees, and the smoke I blew from my cig. After a while I got up to leave, grabbed my bass purse and keys. My cigs and lighter. She looked up with a quick motion, “Where are you going?”
“Home,” I said.
