"Playground Story," by Kevin Spaide

This narrator delivers a great sense of menace from the beginning, “I get vertigo if I stray near the window.” He doesn’t speak the native language where he lives which heightens his fear of speaking with others in the presence of his toddler son. A girl wearing “outer-space insectoid quality” sunglasses blocks his son from the playground slide. There are many funny moments that lighten this narrator’s frustrations. By the end, a tender moment with his wife lifts this story to the uniquely complex tangle of life. Read it here in FRIGG.