Part 2: Outlines on the Ground
By Armando Ortiz
Another memory that comes to mind, when the citipati comes out and circles around my mind, is the sudden appearance of two images in the middle of the playground of our elementary school. Our school didn’t have a grassy area, it was just one long asphalt field where kids played basketball, tetherball, kickball and other games. In the summer the black playground seemed to radiate more heat than the sun’s rays. The images resembled astronauts spacewalking, suspended in space, like the image of the first cosmonauts that orbited the earth. In between these two images was something that we believed to be a light-saber, like the ones used in the space wars film.
The unnatural beings appeared to be suspended in mid flight within a petrol background, giving the impression that time had suddenly stopped for the astronauts. Space, in this case, was where we played kickball. A black lake of asphalt with solid yellow lines indicating where kids lined up in the mornings and played during the day. Outlines, these were the only remnants the travelers had left behind, as if the black grounds had made them disappear. The ground was hard, and we ran from one end to the other. We stepped on the outlines and bounced the basketball over the images for days, weeks and months until the rubber of our soles and soccer balls finally made them disappear. Those that had laid there were no longer present, leaving behind a cookie cutter image of themselves. Maybe it had been kids writing on the ground, dreaming and drawing what they would be when they grew up, space explorers. Similar to the assignment every kid gets by outlining one’s body on a piece of paper, cutting it out and drawing in personal details.
Who had been outlined on our playground and why hadn’t the markings been removed soon afterward is something that I ask myself. Why did these images give the impression that they were men in space, lethargically moving and floating in a cold environment that very few people get to experience. Is death an experience so individual and so haunting that even as a child I ignored it and believed that quite possibly these images were of two people break dancing to the music that was popular back then. For a long time my naïve mind wasn’t able to conceptualize what the white outlines were. Looking back now I realize that this was a crime outline of two people who had lost their lives on our playground.
Across the street from the school was a house that was covered with evergreen vines, and everyone in our class thought it was not only haunted but kept by a solitary strange lady. We’d heard that an old lady lived inside. Next to our school was also an abandoned house that sheltered occasional vagrants and unknown people. Strange things were said to happen inside that house, things that as kids we didn't want to dwell too much on, like wandering spirits and those that loved the night. These residential areas were creepier and haunting than the images that had been aero-soled on the ground. We thought twice about going near those places, yet we didn’t care if the outlines were possibly of two people who had been characters in a real life game of Street Fighter.
These images revealed things that kids were too young to understand, the increasing problems that the city was facing was one part. What kept us preoccupied most back then was going to recess, eating lunch and playing with our buddies. After school we all went back home and watched cartoons. Occasionally stopping to look at the supposedly haunted houses next to the school. It was believed that at night screams could be heard from the empty house. From the outside we could see the acronyms sprayed on the walls of the house and the nicknames of unknown ghosts painted on the stairs, names like Spooky, Tecolote, and Sombra. Everything seemed to exist in the magical realms of cartoon reality and primitive necessity. The perceived unknown was familiar to us, like a gun fight taking place in front of our homes, and the stories told by parents and what we saw on the screens brought fear to our thoughts, like the wicked witch of the east.
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