The Cattle Chute

Evelyn had squeezed herself into a little box. It was more like a cattle chute, actually. Nobody was there to prod her onwards except herself and an imaginary clock that told her she had to keep going. She didn’t know where the chute led, and the light flashing off the metal siding distracted her so that she mostly forgot what was behind. But the feeling of the metal shifting beneath her feet, the sunlight blinding her as she turned the narrow bends, led her to suspect that there wasn’t anything at the end of that chute but a steep drop-off. Maybe there was a pit down there, filled with all the other people who had gotten to the ends of their own cattle chutes.

She remembered the slide at her elementary school playground. It was spiral and fitted together with metal scales that burned bare thighs when the sun was out. Bare-kneed children jostled one another at the top, pressing hard at her back when it was her turn so that she had to let go. She’d hear a boy launch just behind her and would be stricken with the realization that there was another girl just below. She’d think to herself that there was a fifty-fifty chance that at the bottom of the slide, she’d feel the rubber of her shoes smacking against that other girl’s head. And there was a fifty-fifty chance that the boy behind her would smack into hers.

Once, she had tried to slow herself down. Her shorts that day were riding up as she flew down the slide and she found that, by pressing her bare thighs against the metal, she was able to slow down the velocity of her own pudgy body. The friction created a resounding farting noise that her classmates claimed could be heard all the way over to the baseball diamond. The boy behind Evelyn had banged into her anyways, and then kicked her in his haste to turn and scramble back up the slide, complaining loudly about the smell. The other kids teased her cruelly about it until the snow came and buried the slide from view. Eventually they all forgot it ever happened and Evelyn never did it again; never tried to brake or control her speed. But now it seemed that she had been in the cattle chute for some time and she was starting to get worried about what she’d hit when she got to the end.