Highly Commended
Over 18s Category
By Jonathan Margetts
A bottle of vodka in an open-air playground at night; bark-based pine surfacing; a rusted blue slide; a bin filled with crisp packets; ready salted, smoky bacon. Her breath was a combination of Mayfair cigarettes, Smirnoff and strawberry lip balm. We played with extra-safe Durex, and we laughed at the instruction booklet they came supplied with, as if we had no idea how to use them. We laughed at anything that night.
She suggested we move across the park to the skateboard half-pipe. We made sure to take the alcohol with us. I helped her climb up, telling her to hold onto the drop-in rail. It wasn’t icy, she wouldn’t slip. We huddled up in a corner. Written onto the platform floor were someone’s initials, a heart and two crosses.
It wasn’t romance – that’s why we brought the alcohol. Eliminate reality and watch from a third-person perspective at our primordial experimentation. It also made it warmer.
But on that half-pipe, within the neighbourhood park, we believed it was romantic. We had each other and that made it perfect. There wasn’t any alternative, just the occasional car coasting by after a late-night at work.
Afterwards, we climbed down and lay side-by-side in the centre of the half-pipe looking at the stars. An infinite mass overhead that, dependant on your perspective, could be as close as the end of your thumb. We stretched our arms to see who had the longer reach. Instead of laughing, she just smiled. It felt like sleeping.
