SandScript 2023 [Digital Exclusive]

A City Park in Arizona
Madeline Currah
The sun is setting, casting shades of pink and gold across pale, dead grass. Against my skin,
the breeze is cool as water, as if I were in a vast underground pool of light and air. Teenagers
call to each other, and fathers cheer on their children’s soccer games; at the adobe-colored
apartment complex, a mother warns her children of dinner time: 10 minutes, 10 minutes, kids.
Dogs bark and crawl over the parkscape. Each sound is like a dark fish through the pool of air
swirling invisibly around me, calling me back to the moment.
The sun dips further below the surrounding hills, and quietness starts to escape: like small
night-animals emerging from their burrow beginning to sniff the air and raise their cautious
eyes. The lively ecosystem remains active in the pre-dusk. Basketball. Soccer. Dog walkers and
grandparents. A woman with a stolen tire cuts across the grass. They all gather, prepared to
brave beyond the boundary of dark and shine their life’s flames into some of the night before
flying like owls back to their warm nests. Here, they find nourishment and prepare for life again
in tomorrow’s sunlight.
The sun burns on, singing the last of his orange song while dusk steals over the sky: a
smokey, star-speckled thief. The sun sings and sings, til his song turns from orange to gold
to a polished, butter-yellow; he sings boldly til at last the curtain falls, and new stage is set for
the quiet, pale, effacing moon. My own dinner, my own routine beckons me home. I have a
cat who meows to be fed, people to exchange complex words with. I must put myself to sleep
with books and homework and painting. Home feels like small owl’s nest in the hole of a tree:
one nest among many, I but one of many owls flying through the air. How these liminal spaces
bring us together: we are all the same in the evanescent light of dusk: animals seeking comfort
as best we can.
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