The swing set can seat five little people at any one time. The chains, thick and heavy, have discolored with time and feel cool against small fingers, even during the warm summer months. Black rubber slabs comprise the seats; they sluggishly slouch under the weight of a child pumping her legs up into the air to make the swing go higher, higher, higher….

He had dark hair and small teeth. Whenever she saw him smile, her eyes always drifted to those small teeth. They weren’t misshapen. They were not reminiscent of rodent dentition. They just seemed too small for his mouth.

What he lacked in tooth size he made up in finger length. His long digits wrapped easily around the dark chains of the swing. They also seemed to slither around and strangle the mechanical pencils he used. She imagined that if he had a booger buried high in his nose, his fingers would have little difficulty retrieving the glob of snot.

Though she, too, had dark hair, she had an infrequent smile. When on the swing, she watched the ground, not the sky. When on the ground, she still looked down. He didn’t want to stare at her—his mother had told him several times that it was rude to do so—but he rarely saw her face and wanted to catch a glimpse of her serious features that were often obscured behind the thick curtain of her dark hair. He often settled for her neat penmanship. His letters were like his teeth: small, thin, and occasionally cramped. Her letters were like her unsmiling face: symmetric, consistent, and understated.

During recess, he pushed her on the swing. Using the long palms from which sprung his long fingers, he pushed against the small wings of her upper back and watched her feet sail higher into the ocean of sky. Sometimes she looked over her shoulder to ask him to stop pushing—”I’m high enough”—and he would notice a smile on her face, the corners of her lips lifting her cheeks into cheery baubles. Sometimes she laughed, her little mary jane shoes clacking together at the zenith of her flight.

He liked to see her smile.

Sometimes she pushed him on the swing, too, though she didn’t push him as hard as he pushed her. Usually girls pushed girls and boys pushed boys on the swings, anyway. Contact between the sexes increased the risk of transmission of cooties and everybody wanted to play their part in minimizing infection.

Instead, she walked around the swings with him. Their searches for four-leaf clovers were unsuccessful, as were their attempts to capture butterflies. They, however, did observe the behaviors of bees flitting over the playfield speckled with clover flowers and the shapes of the puffy clouds overhead. He had a penchant for science and found her an able companion when discussing the various colors that comprised sunlight and the anatomy of insects.

She liked the way he noticed things.

The Age of Adolescence soon descended upon them all. His teeth became more proportional to his mouth and his fingers no longer resembled jointed chopsticks. She began to tuck her hair behind her ears or pin it back so that she could showcase her dazzling smile.

Swings were no longer acceptable.

He and she both grew up and out. Instead of frequenting the playground and the faithful swings, they attended school, read books, travelled the world, ate new foods… and shook the dust of the playground from their shoes.

The chains of the swings continued to discolor. The rubber seats dulled even more, losing their glossy sheen. Weeds started to grow in the sand surrounding the swing set.

She was already walking away from the playground when he arrived. She had sat in a swing—the seat could hardly hold her!—and mindlessly propelled herself along the arc of flight, though she never floated as high as she had in the past. She wondered if he was there, if he could push on her wings, perhaps she could touch the smile into the sky again?

If he was there. He hadn’t been there in years.

He didn’t call her name when he saw her—that was so long ago and she was so far away. He felt the soft spring of the clover underfoot and looked up into the afternoon sky, squinting at the brilliant orb that hadn’t shrunk in size as he had aged.

All five swings were empty, but he chose not to sit. With his slender right hand he picked up one swing, feeling rubber between his fingers. His left hand wrapped around the old chain, still cool against his touch. He released the swing and watched it trace a small arc, back and forth, back and forth… though it was now without a smile, without a pair of small mary janes. Her small wings had undoubtedly opened and she had taken flight.

The swing set can seat five little people at any one time. And though it can also hold the memories of two big people, it cannot comfortably support the presence of them both.