Big

Two children sit on a bench in the middle of a park, holding hands and counting out how many trees they can see. Their mothers rest in a generously shady spot behind them, on a blanket in the grass.

“Let’s play I spy,” the girl says, taking her hand from his and covering both her eyes, “Okay go!”

“But that’s not how you play!” he cries, and she laughs at the sudden hysteria in his voice.

Timmy’s always been one to follow all the rules – he’s never had any imagination. To him, things have always been done a certain way, and should always be done that way, forever and ever and ever. Sometimes it annoys her, but today it doesn’t. Today it makes her want to hug him and protect him from a world that will refuse to cater to his desperate need to always have everything in order. But she doesn’t know that this is why she wants to hug him. She just does.

“Just play!” she says and lets out a small giggle.

“How are you going to guess what I spy?” he asks, sounding genuinely confused.

“I have a memory, so I know,” and apparently this suffices for now.

She can picture his furrowed brow in the silence that follows – she can almost see him mulling the explanation over in his head. Finally, he says, “Okay, I guess. I spy with my little eye, something that is big.”

She thinks about it for a few seconds, trying to piece together the scene around her from the memory she claimed to have. She remembers a dog somewhere in the distance, and maybe a dad with a child by the swings, but who knows if they’re still there. After contemplating it for a few more seconds, a smile breaks out across her face and she says, “That’s easy, it’s me!” and she hops off the bench and starts stomping around like a giant.

“You’re wrong and that’s cheating!” he cries.

She can tell that he’s upset – that he’d wanted to play seriously and now she’s ruined another one of their games, so she says, “Then it’s you! You’re big too!”

This makes him smile, and soon he is up and stomping around just like her. Sometimes it drives him crazy that she can be so quick to pick up and abandon things, always hopping around from one thing to the next. But today it makes him feel freer than he actually is.

They stomp around for a while and soon they’re growling and roaring and now they are dinosaurs roaming the ancient Earth.

“Being big makes me tired,” he says after a couple of minutes, and then sits back down on the bench.

Suddenly she laughs and points to a spot behind his head, and he turns to find both of their mothers with their eyes closed, lying in the shade of a tree.

Now they’re both laughing, and she takes her seat beside him.

“Being big is hard,” she agrees.