October 2024 Flash Lit 5:1 - Hand over hand

This used to be easier, Jenny thought, as she swung hand over hand across the monkey bars.  I was lighter then.

 

She pictured her first-grade self in her little white-collared dress and the shorts she had stealthily put on underneath so her panties wouldn’t show when she hung upside down.  There were a lot of things she didn’t know then, but there were calluses on her palms from swinging bar to bar over and over.  It had been almost effortless, free, rhythmic.

 

Not, however, when she was learning to skip a bar, and then, eventually, two bars.  Every time she missed and fell to the tanbark below, she heard the jeers from the line of kids waiting for a turn:  “You fell in the hot lava!”

 

Focus, she said to herself.  Here in hell, the lava was real.