In a Flash by Marcus Delmont

Diane tilted her head back to find the top of the slide, one hand shading her eyes, and thought: that’s very high up for an eight-year-old alone.

“Mom, can I go?”

Her eyes followed the slide’s downward arc, its twists and loops. Bodies zipped through the tube. Muffled cries reverberated outward to the ground. Her chest tightened.

Jessie tugged her hand. “Can I?”

Diane looked down at her son. “Maybe it’s not a good idea.”

“But there are other kids the same size as me.”

She looked at the people walking up the stairs to the slide’s entrance and conceded that Jessie had a point, though she wouldn’t admit it to him. Amidst the bigger teenage kids, she saw short and skinny ones like her son, running up the stairs with friends or going alone and waving back to their parents from the top. But the thought that Jessie would be mixing with 16-year-old boys alone at the top of a stupidly tall slide only made her anxiety worse. She sighed.

“Why don’t we go together?”

Jessie threw her hand aside. “But you said I could go by myself.”

“Yes, but when I look at the slide now I think it might be too much for you to go all alone.”

“You’re not being fair,” he said, folding his arms.

“What if you fall on the stairs?”

“That won’t happen. I’ll go slow.”

Diane put her hands on her hips. “But what if you go on the wrong slide? There are three up there.”

Jessie pointed at the sign. “It’s the ‘Flash’ slide. I know which one.”

Diane saw a little girl appear from the bottom of the slide. She wore a pink one piece and was laughing. She had to be at least nine, Diane thought.

“But I don’t know if you’re tall enough.”

Jessie walked to the sign of a dolphin wearing sunglasses at the bottom of the stairs and stood with his back flat against it. He put his hand atop his head and took a step back. “Mom, look—I’m tall enough.”

Diane held back a smile. She’d first taken him to the water park when he was one and all he could do was splash around in the paddling pool. Now he was tall enough to ride a slide alone.

“It’s my birthday,” pleaded Jessie. “You said I could do what I wanted.”

“I did say that.”

“I want to go on the slide by myself.”

Diane sighed again. “But what if something happens?”

Jessie smiled. “Mom, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

She glanced around her. There were throngs of kids everywhere she looked, but also just as many adults. Grandparents swaying with their grandkids in the wave pool. A dad with a tiger tattooed on his shoulder carrying a little girl in a shimmery swimsuit. She saw an adult telling a group of wet kids to be back in an hour for lunch. She saw lifeguards wearing white polo shirts, loose red shorts and rubber crocs with radios strapped to their chests. To Diane, they looked young, but also strong and capable.

“Okay. You can go.”

Jessie smiled. “Yes! You’re the best mom ever!”

“Let’s see if you still think that when I say it’s time to go home.”

“So, can I really go?” Jessie asked uncertainly.

Diane ruffled his hair. “Yes. Go before I change my mind.”

Jessie skipped to the stairs and ran up.

“Careful on the stairs!” she cried after him.

“Don’t worry mom!”

Diane watched Jessie scramble up the stairs, wincing every time she thought he took a corner too quickly. In truth, she wasn’t too nervous about Jessie being in the actual slide—she’d never heard about anyone getting even a minor injury coming down a water slide. She was more nervous about him slipping on the way up and knocking his head on the stairs or freezing with fear at the entrance and holding everyone else up. These fears were unfounded, because she saw Jessie wave to her excitedly from the top, and there weren’t too many people anyway, she reasoned. She resigned herself to the reality that her little boy was really going to go down a tall water slide alone on his eighth birthday. It’s better than what he’ll want to do when he’s thirteen, she thought. Diane joined the other adults at the bottom of the slide and waited.

Jessie couldn’t believe his mom was letting him go down the slide alone. Going up the stairs, he thought about how he’d tell his dad and grandparents about it. His school friends would accuse him of lying, but he’d describe everything: the feeling of the steel-grated stairs on his feet, the color of the slide, and exactly what it felt like while going down. At the top, it took a while for Jessie to find his mom; everyone looked like little ants to him. After a minute, he spotted her waving at him and he waved back, watching her walk to the bottom of the slide. That’s when Jessie felt his stomach turn. From the ground, the slide looked gentle. But from the top, he felt like he was atop a mountain. He started to wonder if his mom had been right all along until another boy tapped his shoulder.

“Are you in line?”

Jessie looked up and blinked. The boy looked like he could’ve been fourteen or fifteen. “Yeah. I’m going on the Flash slide.”

The boy nodded ahead. “Then it’s your turn. No one’s there.”

Jessie looked at the slide’s entrance. “Yeah, guess so.”

“You nervous?” said the boy.

The slight undertone of challenge in the boy’s voice puffed up Jessie’s courage. “No way. I’m going now.”

            He walked resolutely to the entrance of the slide and sat, cool water flowing around his waist. He gripped the metal railings above him and waited for the light to turn green.

            Diane had seen three kids come out of the slide in the minutes since she had waved at Jessie. She was relieved to see that they had popped out of the tube in one piece. The tension in her shoulders eased. Everything was fine, she understood. Hundreds of kids went down this slide every day, she thought, maybe thousands. She imagined how her husband would rib her later. You gotta let that boy live a little, Diane. She crossed her arms, looked at her watch and thought, Easy for a dad to say.

The light flashed green. Jessie nudged his hips forward but felt stuck. He heard the other boy’s voice again.

“I’ll give you a push.”

Jessie felt a hand on his back and suddenly he skidded down the tube. He screamed on the first sharp descent but soon found a way to stabilize himself, yelling with delight.

Diane looked at her watch again. It was two minutes since the last kid came out of the slide. She supposed Jessie would be next if he hadn’t chickened out at the top. She overheard two moms next to her talking about lunch. The lifeguard in the white polo shirt and red shorts spoke lazily into his radio.

Jessie leaned back as he glided down the slide, using the palms of his hands to adjust his speed and to keep him from feeling like he was going to flip on the sharp turns. He wasn’t thinking about his parents or his school friends. All he could register was the red and yellow colors zipping by him. Though he knew he was going fast, he felt like he’d been on the slide for a long time, and he wondered when he’d see the bottom. Suddenly, he felt the cool water become hot. The slide curved a sharp right into another descent. Instead of the red and yellow tubing, he saw black. The air around him smelled rotten. Seconds later, he thought he saw a tongue. Then, nothing.

Diane looked at her watch again, thinking that Jessie should’ve come out already. She stepped away to look up at the slide’s entrance and saw that there were people and the line seemed to be moving. She walked back and fixed her gaze at the slide’s exit.

She flagged the lifeguard after another five minutes had passed. “Excuse me. Is there something wrong with the slide? My son should’ve come out by now.”

The lifeguard raised his eyes and smiled reassuringly. “All’s fine, ma’am.”

“Okay. It’s just that my boy is eight and he went up by himself. He should’ve come by now.”

The lifeguard looked past Diane. “Kids get scared sometimes and hold up the line.”

Diane looked at her watch again—another ten minutes had passed. More adults gathered next to her and some of them looked worried. She noticed that the lifeguard hadn’t been busy and asked him about it.

“Haven’t you noticed that nobody is coming out?” she asked.

He rolled his eyes. “Like I said, ma’am, sometimes kids get freaked out at the last second and hold up the line.”

The dad with the tiger tattooed on his shoulder spoke up, holding his daughter’s hand. “But I saw my kid go into the slide and it’s been way more than fifteen minutes. He should’ve come out by now.” Other parents began to raise their voices.

Diane saw that the lifeguard started to feel overwhelmed. She waved to get his attention. “How many kids have you seen go in this slide?”

“Today?” he asked. “Hundreds.”

“In the last ten minutes.”

He shrugged and looked around. “I dunno. Ten or fifteen?”

Diane stared hard at him, doing her best to keep her voice calm. “Then why haven’t any kids come out?”

The lifeguard paused and then spoke into his walkie-talkie. “Rich, everything okay up there?”

Rich responded at once. “Sure thing. What’s up?”

“You haven’t seen anything unusual up there in the last five or ten minutes?”

A brief pause, then Rich’s voice crackled back in. “All’s fine. Kids are going in. Why?”

Diane saw the lifeguard gulp hard. “Rich, stop the slide.”

“Why? What the hell’s going on?”

“Stop the slide, Rich. No one’s coming out.”

  “What the fuck? Everything’s norm—”

The lifeguard’s eyes widened as he looked up. “STOP THE GODDAMNED SLIDE.”

Diane stood frozen next to her car, gripping the door handle. She could feel the heat slightly searing her palm; it had been baking in the sun all day. Her eyes clicked several things inside the car: two comic books in the back seat, a coffee thermos in the cup holder, a pair of small white sneakers on the floor of the passenger seat. A scream somewhere in the parking lot snapped her out of her trance. She turned and squinted, recognizing the face of the woman she saw earlier in the day talking to a group of wet children inside the water park. The woman was sobbing into her phone.

“THEY’RE ALL GONE! They’re gone they’re gone they’re gone they’re—”

The phone vibrated in her bag. Dozens of news app notifications cluttered the screen.

Reports of missing children in water parks across seven states; numbers unknown.

California’s largest water park shut by police.

Unrest at America’s largest indoor water park in Round Rock, Texas; casualties reported.

Diane tapped the notification from her town’s local newspaper. Three of their vans were still parked at the entrance. A video appeared of a journalist interviewing a boy and his parents in the parking lot. The mother’s face was blanched white.

“Could you tell me what you saw inside the water park?” the reporter asked the boy.

“Nothing. Everything was normal,” he replied.

“You didn’t see anything unusual?”

“No.”

The reporter looked at the parents. “He was about to go into the slide when the workers shut it down,” said the mother. The father nudged his son’s shoulder and whispered reassurance.

“I guess I noticed something.”

The reporter crouched to the boy’s level. “What did you notice?”

He lowered his eyes. “The water got hot all of a sudden. It was dark inside the slide.”

“Did you see anything else?”

“No. I don’t know. There was a smell, like it was rotten.”

An incoming call paused the video. It was Diane’s mother. She rejected it. Her husband’s call immediately followed. She took it and raised the phone to her ear.

“Diane—what happened? What’s going on?”

“I’ll be home soon,” she said, her face slack. She ended the call and sat behind the wheel of her car. She screamed.

Diane lay on her sofa, knees tucked to chest, staring at the television. It was one a.m. and she was still in her swimsuit. Her husband had kept telling her to change—at least into her bathrobe—but she wasn’t ready for that. Diane felt she’d be ready to change into other clothes when what had happened made sense. She couldn’t imagine it ever would.

Mark had tried arguing with her earlier, as if raising his voice until it hit a shrill pitch would knock her out of her stupor. She had sat at the kitchen table while he scrambled, calling anyone he could think of. Eventually he threw the phone at the wall when he couldn’t hear the police station’s holding message any longer.

“What did he say? When he went up to the slide. What’s the last thing he said?”

In a flash, the fugue cleared from Diane’s eyes. She saw breadcrumbs on the wooden table. A pastel drawing of a family on the fridge. The sounds of the waterpark from earlier in the day crescendoed in her ears like a radio station coming into focus.

            “Don’t worry.”

Mark pressed his lips. “Diane, how can you say that? Our son is missing and—”

“That’s what he said.” Her eyes felt hazy again. “He said, ‘Don’t worry mom.’”

Television light danced across Diane’s face. She knew that on the screen was a news man, and she knew he was talking about what had happened. Her mind knew this without thinking.

On the screen, the news man wiped his brow with a handkerchief. His eyes were dark circles, his tie slightly undone.

“Reports are still coming in about what happened today.” He paused and looked at his papers. When he continued, it sounded like an amplified whisper.

“What we know is that what happened at the Super Slide Water Park earlier today has happened elsewhere.”

 “It was 12:18 p.m. when the management at our local water park shut down the slides. We’ve since learned that other water parks across the country did the same at roughly the same time.” He continued to gaze at his desk. A voice came in from off camera. He looked up.

“To recap: children have gone missing at water parks throughout America today, as well as the world. At roughly the same time. The reasons are still unknown.”

Someone slipped a piece of paper onto his desk. He put on his glasses and read. He looked vacantly at the camera.

“A new detail has come in. Police indicate that many of the missing are only chil—”

Diane turned off the television and let the remote control fall from her hand. She reached down into her waist and brought Jessie’s swim trunks to her nose. It smelled of damp chlorine and boy. Only Diane noticed that they were the last thing to have emerged from the Flash slide that day.

Image by Max Romulus from Pixabay A long colourful waterslide tunnel in a blue pool.

Marcus Delmont