This is how it begins: your father grants five minutes in the play-place while he orders two hamburgers. You bolt through the door and into the glass room, slip your shoes into the cubby, gaze at the colorful, massive structure towering over you. Up the tunneled ladder you climb, latching onto each rubber rung, dawdling on all fours, fully feral. You rush through each section and subsection, burrowing deeper into the fluorescent caverns. In this place, you are an explorer. In this place, you are an escapee. In a tube, you face-off with another child, at the opposite end, heading your direction. You squeeze past one another, giggling all the while. You are but two cells in this rich, brilliant network. From a window on one side, you overlook the parking lot, where cars pull in and out from the highway, unknowingly surveilled. On the other, you look into the restaurant, where your father is holding an unraveled burger wrapper, bun splayed in two parts, open face and open face, as he shows it to a manager. He has found a stray hair, perhaps a fly. Your father is always finding hair and flies. You, however, have slipped into the heart of the edifice; out of the dense tunnels and into a large room; round, saucer-like, a view of every angle. There are other children here, gathered. You wonder if their parents are finding flies in their burgers too. One boy hunches as the others stand. Soon, he will be too big. You scan the congregation, this parade of squirm. Into a ball pit you celebrate, dip your hands into the pile, run your fingers across the lining in search of coins, artifacts. This is what your brother taught you. You find something, a dum-dum sucker, an explosive shade of blue. It is dry and packed with dehydrated flavor. You pop the sucker into your mouth, let the artificial berry dissolve, steep your saliva with its richness. Some other child’s loss. You drop the sucker back among the balls, let it fall in the pit for another to find; your small camaraderie. This is how it ends: your father knocks on the glass, you whisk down a slide and grab your shoes, return to two legs. The blue still purrs on your tongue.