At The Park

Count the number of paving stones. Ignore the sound of traffic, the trains going by too. Focus on the willows bending towards the water, pay attention to the water. Ignore the dogs. Count the children.

But each time you count the children you come up with a different number. So you count them again, over and over. Count them again. Sometimes there are eleven, running and screaming, but just as suddenly there isn’t, eleven, now there’s eight, or they’re not the same children, so you count them once more, just to be sure.

You’re so focused you don’t realize there’s a child in front of you.

“What are you doing?” she says. “Are you counting to see how many of us there are?”

You nod. The little girl is standing on three paving stones, two under one foot, one foot upon just a single one. Her shoes are black and shiny. Then her shoes are just sneakers with pink cartoon princesses on them.

“There are five thousand eight hundred and seventy-one children here,” she says. “Because that is the highest number there is.” She says all of that with certainty, like she knows what she is talking about, and you don’t.

You look around. You see all these children, so, so many children, all of them running around, all of them screaming.

“You look scared,” she says. “Are you scared?”

You nod.

“Maybe you should count something easier,” the child says. “Like seagulls. There used to be three. Now there’s just two.”

She stares at you as you look around for the seagulls. The dogs are barking and barking and barking.

“And now there’s only one,” she says.

BIO: Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s fiction can be found in X-Ray, The Pinch, Invisible City, Heavy Feather Review and The Offing. His short story "Taylor Swift" won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story "Goodwill" was picked as one of Wigleaf’s Top Fifty Very Short Fictions. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. He lives in Barcelona. https://linktr.ee/hughsteinberg.