The War Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

to watch the baby as Margaret went down to the restaurant to eat lunch. She said sure, but to come and get her if the baby needed changing.
                  The other kids sat on the bridge of the Splash, eating stale hamburger buns, feeding little bits they could spare to some birds. I took the baby and put her in a chipped red-painted swing, strapped her in, and gently pushed the swing so it would sway back and forth.
          The dumbass kid started climbing up the chain again. I yelled again but this time he ignored me.
                  Well, some lessons need to be learned. He got to the middle of the chain when a bunch of little girls started to rock the seat the chain was attached to. He lost his balance and fell about eight feet or so. Landed on his bottom. Then he started laughing but he didn’t go near the swing again. Lesson learned.
                  And that was why I liked to keep my feet low to the ground like a little mole.
                  “Can’t fall if you aren’t up high,” I said to Jim once.
                  Then he said, “But that way, you can’t touch the stars.” Then I explained what would happen to my body if I did, in fact, touch a star.
                  Something started smelling like a rotted-out pumpkin so I leaned over to the baby and sniffed. We had a winner.
                  I took Logan and sat her on the ground and rummaged around the area for assorted baby things. Finding a handmade diaper made from some old linens and those clip things you put on bags of potato chips, I proceeded to change her diaper.
                  Or his. Or technically and physically, both, really. Which one was the spare? I didn’t know.
    I decided to keep referring to Logan as a her in my brain just because. Until Logan decided which part was the spare, if any.
         
    ~~~
     
                  After a while, I sat at table by myself. A group of people gave me an invitation to join them in a game of poker but I made up some excuse about being tired from playing mama to a dozen kids. Maybe some other time, I said. They left me alone.
                  More and more people started arriving and some even sat down at my table so I felt inclined to leave because I didn’t feel like talking. Although talking would have given me a good chance to practice more lying but I didn’t quite feel like it just then. I walked around aimlessly, looking at this worn-down amusement park. Broken glass from the arcade games and enough trash to start a small landfill scattered everywhere. Painted, demonic cartoon characters with smiles stretched across their faces laughed at you from every angle on the walking path.
                  I might have actually been here when I was really young. I had some moments of deja vu but maybe I was just remembering a commercial that I saw once. The melody of the jingle was playing somewhere in the back of my head.
                  It wasn’t until the bag seemed to get heavier that I remembered that the boy suggested that I stash my stuff.
                  I walked further until I got to the water rides. There’s lockers there that I could have used but that was too obvious of a spot.
                  What I needed was a place that was hard to get to or somewhere that nobody would want to go. The tree house popped into my mind but that was already occupied.
                  Then I got it. I knew the perfect place to hide my hobo bag but I would have to wait until it got dark. Better I hid it alone than in the presence of that boy, who knew if he was trustworthy.
                  I thought of his arms. I liked his muscular arms. What I would have traded for a camera to take a picture of them just so I could stare at it before I went to bed. I couldn’t believe I even admitted that to myself. Jim had a camera