Time Slowed

She wiggled and squirmed in the plastic tube. Nothing. She tried to contort her body and pull her arm up. Close, but still nothing. She could wiggle her feet and kick the shiny green walls that held her in place, but it seemed there was nobody around to come to her rescue. 

            The forest-colored slide was nearly black on the inside. The only light source came from a tiny crack down near her ankles. A thin line of white light reflected off the green walls and illuminated the orange and pink stripes on her knee-high socks. This must be where two of the circular tubes of plastic were bolted together, she thought. The slide had a strange odor that flooded her nostrils. She could sense a bit of mulch and crisp air, but it was overpowered by a stench that resembled rotten eggs scrambled with dead bugs. Any sort of airflow was cut off by her big, fat body, so the smell had no choice but to stay trapped inside. 

It was moments like this that Grace Gomez resented being fat. No skinny kid would get stuck in a slide. A skinny kid wouldn’t be forgotten about during a game of hide and seek. They wouldn’t even hide in a slide in the first place since their tiny bodies could lodge into small spaces on other parts of the playground. Grace couldn’t help but think that her classmates had left her out here on purpose. Maybe they knew she was in the slide and thought it would be some sort of sick joke to leave her out there. Bully the fat kid without being mean to her face. Leave her to struggle on her own and prove that she needs to lose weight. 

            Truthfully, Grace would prefer that her bullies throw mean insults about her weight to her face. If they said it to her directly, she could retort with a snarky comeback, or maybe even raise her arm and threaten to throw a punch. But Grace’s fifth-grade classmates had gotten smarter and more creative. They knew that verbal insults could be overheard by teachers and get them sent to the principal’s office. Instead, they teased Grace by extending a superficial invite to play together at recess, and then screwed her over by leaving her out there to die alone in a plastic, green slide. 

            THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.  She kicked her white tennis shoes against the walls of the slide in hopes that someone was still on the playground and could hear her. Had recess really ended? Was everyone in that big of a rush to go learn about geometry that they ran off before searching for her? 

            THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. She continued to kick her feet until her legs grew tired. The blood flow to the lower half of her body was slowly cutting off, and her toes started to feel like they had pins and needles poking and prodding them. It was only a matter of time until those electric-feeling pulses made their way up to her squished abdomen. But, Grace told herself not to panic. There had to be a way out. Her arms were stuck at her sides, and the polyester material of her sweatshirt was beginning to make the skin around her midsection chafe from all the wiggling. She could feel the rolls of fat on her stomach threatening to spill out of her denim skirt at any second, but truthfully, there was nowhere for the excess skin to go. Grace was completely squished on either side. 

            “Urghhhh” Grace said as she attempted to pull her right arm upward. “Curse me for keeping my arms at my sides. How dare I follow the slide rules! URGH!” She pulled and wiggled some more. 

            As she attempted to twist her body and free at least one of her limbs, her neck turned back and forth and her curly, chocolate-colored hair rubbed against the slick plastic beneath her. The movement produced a bit of friction, and she felt a sharp electric spark when she slightly lifted her head. Not to mention, the static electricity had begun to draw her hair upward, almost as if it was being delicately plucked off her head. Between the sparks near her head and the tingles in her toes that had slowly crept up to her ankles, Grace felt like a supercharged battery.  

            Grace always struggled to make friends at school. Her father was in the military, so her family moved roughly every two years. Just when she would get comfortable in a new place and start to open up to new friends, her parents would uproot her life and enroll her someplace new. This was Grace’s third school in the past two years, and she had yet to make any close friends. On her first day of fifth grade, Grace sat at a lunch table with a group of girls that seemed friendly enough. Only, when she opened her lunchbox and pulled out a burrito, one of the girls said “well no wonder you’re so fat.” Apparently, the cool girls in fifth grade starved themselves and only ate a piece of fruit at lunchtime. Grace felt humiliated and ate alone every day after that one. She feared that everyone else would treat her the same way. Sometimes she would try and socialize with her classmates at recess, but they often found ways to exclude her or eliminate her from their games early on. Although nobody ever made any more comments about her weight, she knew that people disliked her because she was fat. 

Two hours passed. Maybe even four or five. Or, had it been eight? She stopped counting the minutes shortly after she heard the recess bell call her classmates back inside at one o’clock. When the last voice left the playground and the glass doors to the elementary school slammed shut off in the distance, time slowed. By now, it was probably nighttime and the springtime mosquitos were sure to invade her temporary habitat soon. Granted, the slide was pitch black from the moment Grace lodged herself into it, but she imagined that the sun was setting outside and darkness was set to takeover. 

By now, her whole body had gone numb. At first the sensation made her tragic situation even more uncomfortable, but after a while, the pins and needles coursing through her skin started to have a chilling effect. It felt like someone dragged an ice cube down her bare, pale skin, and tiny pink goosebumps slowly poked up over her pores. Maybe it was just getting colder outside. Maybe it was actually dropping to below-freezing temperatures and her excess fat and the plastic walls enveloping her were keeping me insulated. It was hard to tell. 

“Can time actually slow down?” Grace thought. “Or can I speed it up?” She rocked my head to the side and rested her cheek on the plastic beneath her. Characters in movies always imagined themselves somewhere else and woke up in new settings. The movies made it look easy.

“Wait, can I time travel out of here?” The idea crossed her mind. Grace closed her eyes and tapped her ankles together three times. “I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home” she said aloud. Grace twisted my head back upright. An electric shock zapped her neck. “Dammit,” she said while opening her eyes. 

At some point Grace fell asleep. Either the loss of blood circulation to her brain finally cut off, or perhaps she was just exhausted from squirming and shimmying too much. Sleeping inside a plastic tube with no way of rolling over or getting remotely comfortable was a challenge. In the first few minutes of her slumber, she seemingly forgot where she was and attempted to lift her hand and rest it under her cheek like a make-shift pillow. The first time she moved her wrist an inch, and it smacked into the curved, hard wall next to it. When she attempted to readjust only minutes later, her tattered sweatshirt rubbed her skin and left a rash on her forearm. Eventually, Grace gave up on the idea of comfort and opted to put her brain into a deep trance where she could forget where she was. She did not have any memorable dreams. Her brain knew better than to give her a sense of hope via a falsified reality in an imagined space. 

Grace snored when she slept. Her mother once told me her that she sounded like an airplane preparing its engines for takeoff. Most fifth graders probably did not snore as loudly as her, but she had the extra rolls of fat around her neck to thank for that. Her working theory was that her chubby skin cut off the airflow to her neck more than the average person. And Grace supposed that is something she would be self-conscious about if she ever got invited to a slumber party with the other girls in her class. But, she had yet to be invited to a sleepover. Not to mention, Grace supposed she owed her eventual rescue to her excess fat and obnoxious snores. 

THWACK. THWACK. THWACK. The plastic walls around her vibrated and slightly shook as the loud slamming noises next to her head startled her awake. 

            “Yo! Is somebody in here?”

            She rolled my head and cracked her neck. A small groan slipped out of her mouth and gave away her location. 

            “Yo! I hear you in there!” A low-toned voice said from outside. “Man, what are you doing in here! Get outta here!”

            “I can’t.” Grace’s voice shook with hesitation. She panicked and tried to squirm out of the slide again, but she felt even more constricted than before. 

            “What do you mean you can’t?”

            “I mean…I literally can’t! It won’t let me!”

            “It’s a slide, man. Just slide down.” The deep voice grew softer and she could tell he had moved away from the area where her upper body was lodged. 

            “I’m stuck! I’m stuck in the slide! So…no, sir, I can’t just slide down!” Grace started kicking her feet against the walls to prove that any movement was unhelpful. She prayed he would be able to get her out, but his lack of understanding about the definition of the word “stuck” was irritating. She sighed again. The sound of footsteps crunching across the mulch nearby got closer. 

            “Yo! I see your feet from down here!”

            Grace kicked and wiggled her ankles some more. 

            “Aye! Aye! Stop that! You’re hurting my ears, kid.” 

            “You can see me? Can you get me out? I’m stuck.” 

            “Yeah, I’m going to pull you. You good with that? Can I grab your ankles?” As soon as the voice told Grace he was going to help, she pointed her toes and attempted to elongate her legs as best she could. Strong hands wrapped around her feet only seconds later. Even through her thick socks, she could tell that the hands were big and belonged to someone very strong. 

            “One—” he said while giving a light tug. “Two!” He pulled a bit harder. “THREE!” He yanked her feet so hard that one of her ankles cracked. 

            “I don’t think it worked!” Grace said. Anxiety slowly creeped back into her voice. She felt his hands wrap tighter around her feet to keep pulling, but her squished stomach barely budged. The lack of sensation in her body had disappeared, and suddenly she could feel everything happening inside and around her. The stranger’s hands on her ankles. Her lungs getting smaller. The air was thinner. Her chest tightened. Grace squeezed her eyes shut and imagined she was at the beach, free-floating in the ocean. 

            “Hey. Hey! It’s going to be okay! We’re going to get you out, okay? You hear me?” The man’s voice was strong and determined. Any sense of anger from earlier was replaced by concern and reassurance. 

            “Yeah” Grace said. She imagined it sounded more like a whispery moan than a confident reply. 

            “One more try!” He said before giving her feet one final tug. Grace let out a quick exhale the moment she felt my ankles being pulled downward. When she went to inhale again, her stomach felt freer. Her body had moved a bit, even if it was only by an inch.

            “Again.” Grace said to the man outside. “Keep pulling!”

            It took approximately twenty-five more tugs to get her out of the slide. Once the man and Grace had coordinated her breathing rhythm with his pulls, they managed to loosen the plastic tube’s unforgiving hold on her body enough for her to wiggle the rest of the way down on her own. She kept her eyes closed as she shimmied down toward the bottom exit. She was embarrassed and not ready to face the stranger who wasted his energy helping a fat kid get out of a slide. 

            When her ankles hung off the rim of the slide, Grace felt a pair of hands wrap around her waist and stand her up straight. Her legs felt like spaghetti and nearly gave out, but the hands tightened and steadied her until she could stand on her own. She opened her eyes and looked straight into the blue corduroy chest in front of her. A large man with a big belly stood in front of her. He had a tattered baseball cap on his seemingly bald head, and a white moustache rested above his mouth. If Grace was in a happier mood, she would’ve compared the man to a modern day working Santa Clause. 

            “Kid, you okay?” the man said, peering down at the young girl before him. “How’d you get up there anyway?” 

             “I was playing hide and seek, and then I got stuck,” Grace said to the man. Based on his blue boiler suit, she guessed he was one of the school janitors. His firm hands and tall, muscular build made more sense now.

            “Really…hide and seek? Huh.”

            “Yeah I think they purposely left me out here,” she said while rolling her shoulders backward. Every movement she made resulted in some sort of cracking noise from one of her joints. 

            “That’s tough kid,” the janitor said. “Look, I wish I could help you out but you got to get back to class before we both get in trouble.” 

            “Class?” Grace asked. “What do you mean class?” 

            “Kid, you’ve got school.” The janitor took a half step to the side and gestured toward Grace to start walking. “What’s your teacher’s name? I’ll take you back.” 

            “Wait, when did recess end?” she asked him. The janitor brought his arm back toward his chest to look at his wristwatch. His sleeve was already rolled up, and she noted some black stains littered across his clothes. 

            “Thirty-four minutes ago,” he said. “Now c’mon kid, we don’t have all day.” 

            The janitor started trudging toward the school. His heavy steel-toed boots left wide footprints in the mulch underneath him, and Grace noted that he had a slight limp. She was in total disbelief and wanted to stay standing next to the slide to process what the janitor just told her. But despite the janitor’s calming tone earlier, he scared Grace and she feared what he would do if she didn’t follow him inside. So, she let out one final deep exhale and chased after the janitor who was already halfway across the playground.