approximately 1,150 words

 

 

 

 

 

 

TIMMY ©

by Mercedes Pecunia

 

It was an early autumnal evening and I found myself walking along the border of Central Park enjoying the quiet time. It seemed lately I was so busy with work and school that I never had a moment to just take in the view of the City.  I brought a book with me. I read my research books in spurts these days. Sometimes, I would read a few dozen or even a hundred pages and then sometimes I could not get through just one. However, today, I had resolved to separate some time and catch up on my reading. I entered the park on 90^th Street and Central Park West. I walked down the ramp and turned left to enter the old playground. My mother used to bring me here to play when I was a child. She always encouraged me to play with the other children, but they always isolated me or would make fun of me. They would call me "stupid" or tell me that what I was saying did not make any sense.

In time, I learned that soliciting the company of my peers was a senseless waste of my time. When my mother would bring me back here, I would wander alone and play by myself. This went on for some time until the day that Timmy befriended me. I was sitting on a swing. All the other kids had run away as was customary when they saw me approach them. I sat there weeping silently for a bit as my mother sat behind a tree to shield herself from the merciless sun.  She could not see me. I felt so utterly alone and sat there staring down at the padded ground before me. When I looked up again, there was a boy about my own age sitting on the swing next to me. I was about seven or eight then if I recall correctly. He was blonde with the most innocent yet piercing blue eyes. He looked almost angelic sitting there in the sunlight. He was somewhat transparent and that=s how I knew that he was there for me and only for me.

Timmy and I became great friends. He used to tell me that he felt very lonely when I wasn=t around. He was such a loyal and giving person. It did not matter that my mother did not believe he was real because he was real to me. She used to tell me that all children my age had friends that only lived in their imaginations, but that I had to learn to distinguish between fantasy and reality. For years, I struggled to fully understand the subtle differences, but it was much better to indulge in sweet and blissful ignorance and not risk losing my best friend.

One evening, my mother placed our local evening paper on the dining room table and to my surprise; it contained a picture of Timmy. I was a slow reader so I could not make out the words that made up the headline to the story. I told my mother that was my friend, the one from the park. She just chuckled and said, "Oh honey, that boy disappeared in the Park just over a year ago. His picture is in the paper so that the community can remember him." I did not care that she did not believe me because it would not change things between Timmy and me. I had already known that no one else besides me could see Timmy.

One afternoon, a week before my ninth birthday, I found Timmy crying. I asked him what was wrong and he told me how sad he was because he knew I would not be his friend for very much longer. I vowed to always be his friend. I would never let anything come between us, but he continued sulking. He would not be consoled and that evening, I went home with a heavy heart. I could not understand what he had meant. I could not see how we would be separated. Thinking back on it, it was coincidentally odd how my mother never took me back there again.

Then, when I was 12 years old, I passed by the old playground on my brand new bicycle and I noticed an empty swing being propelled rhythmically. Back and forth, back and forth the swing moved as if some invisible child willed it to do so, but there was no child. There was nothing but wind. Yes, it was the wind. How could it be otherwise? Even then, the notion was ridiculous to me. There were no such things as ghosts and that was the end of that. I did not even bother to think about this old wives tale until one day when I was already in college, my journalism professor requested a paper on some exciting event having to do with your own neighborhood. It was then I decided to research and then dismiss this tale once and for all.

The week before Spring Break, I decided to ride my bicycle to the New York Public Library on 42^nd Street, I went up to the periodicals section and began trying to piece together whatever relevant clues I had already. The park had gone through some renovations some years back, but before that, there had been another smaller playground on basically the same spot. Some time before the park=s restoration, a young boy had been found bludgeoned under the snow-filled park. It had been difficult for the authorities to ascertain the exact time of death because the cold had preserved the body to some degree and forensics were not as advanced as they are today. The community had been shocked and forced into a state of paranoid guardianship over their young members. No one could believe that the child would turn up lifeless in such an upscale area of the City. A homeless drunkard had been blamed for the child=s murder. The man was wearing the boy=s scarf and hat at the time of his arrest.  The case was closed.

After I had finished my research it took me several days to place all the information in some coherent fashion for my professor to grade. The night I finally accomplished my task, I sat on one of the outside benches overlooking the playground. It was 8:00 p.m. and the park seemed an icy desolation of hostile immobile presences. The park was abandoned at the onset of dusk. I continued to think about the boy and the murderer. I thought about the fact that although the transient had been connected to the murder there was never enough evidence for a conviction, but someone had paid for it nonetheless. It all remained with me and intrigued me beyond words. I could not stop thinking about Timmy Watkins, poor dead Timmy Watkins. Somnambulant, I strained my eyes to see amidst the shadows, gasping as I spotted Timmy once again seated on a swing just as I remembered him, smiling and waving back to me excitedly.