Morning is a pop up book. Scratch and sniff. Her thigh against his unseals the summer shine of get up, coffee, and go. She answers without eyes to stroll the sun to the new café. He wants to electrify the horizon, to spend their last coins on steamed cream and couple. Along the way lies a hazard of emerald sand. Broken beer bottles on the walking path near the playground of the elementary school. He performs gasps appropriate to the shards. She musters no horror at all. But what about the children? He nods to the school just over the crest of indifferent magnolias. She laughs, says children wouldn’t have been invited to a party on moonlit swingsets. There is always a feast before there is broken glass. First come toasts to pillowed woodchips, then asphalt and beer. She sees boots kicked off and sodden toes rippling moon craters in the stream behind the monkey bars. He is sad as a monk at the sight of the empty case by the slide. She wishes aloud that she could have been there as the stash got low and the voices loud, while he believes in pigtails and hopscotch, the sanctity of freeze tag. She wants the playground at night, to listen as the fulcrum teeters about that time this one drowned a litter of kittens or totters on about that one stealing cars. Then the beer party would surge, she says to his downcast eyes, twirling now as she says it so that the fringe of her dress seems to underline the name of the elementary school on the sign like a Broadway title. And they’d run shoeless along the wet grass of this field. It is a lawn. The lawn of a school. And they’d jump and laugh. Their last beers cradled empty in their arms. Running with glass, so dangerous. And they’d get to this path. What if a child… But she is weary of leaping and scornful of tarred civility. This path, bloated to the weedy edges, drinks up the sun all day. It was fitting, she says, that revelers garnished its surfeit, a sailor’s christening, Russian good cheer, Dionysian votives, bottle dancing in crunch and crisp, foam and blood glistening dew. The words that come to him as she finishes crash. But I thought it was you who wanted children. And this is how he came to be unfashionably late to her beer party on a sharply dusted path under the unforgiving summer sun.