Rope

The girl’s father laughs a little too hard when I say:She knows what’s important in life as his daughter whips the dime store jump rope over her head for the twelve thousandth time— laughs as if I’m joking, when really, she has it down— sparkly pink handles grimy with effort, her face obscured by her hair, shins thin and bruised, socks down at the ankles. Abandoned by the rest of the crowd, the concrete square an archipelago, an alignment with rigor the others cannot fathom, she moves with fierce persistence into afternoon, the heft of the handles, smack of the rope— no Double Dutch, limbo, no communal game, but this resolute definition of rhythm, slatted bench shadows lengthening into space, the other kids simply forgetting she’s there, her solitary corner of the playground darkening as the dinner hour approaches, while pigeons pause on their branches, squirrels come down the trunk and stop, with rush hour beyond the fence, cars idling, and the rope’s metronome, forgotten as breath, weaving all the disparate energies of girl— elation, fury, eagerness, song— into one singular strand.