Your arms stretch longer than your frame suggests, and people notice. They’re useful for hugging and snagging rebounds in casual games. Yet you soon discover they’re even more adept at gathering children and flinging them back, even those who kick and scream, who tug at your hair by the handful, the ones who, for whatever reason, can’t wait to grow up. Who would want something like that?
You weren’t eager to take the job, but once the listing landed in your hands, you imagined it wouldn’t be so terrible to linger in a rye field all day, catching the kids who slip from the edge and returning them to their innocence. It could also be a chance to soak up sun and darken your skin before heading to Provincetown, where perhaps you’ll make the crowd of adventurous souls go wild for you. A real shot at feeling desired for once. You’ve been divorced for ten years. Your ex-wife never calls, only replies with curt texts. Those little thumbs-up icons you could almost push into your eye.
You two never welcomed children, though you tried. That kind of absence bears down on a couple—the suffocating silence that follows a failed dream, the baffling question of how such a thing could be possible.
At first, you knocked the door handle clean off, and after another negative test, you ripped the door from its hinges. The release felt so good, so clarifying, that you imagined a lifetime spent smashing things just to savor the bewilderment that followed. Revel—that was the name you’d drafted for yourself, tucked into your pocket like a small wish.
“What happened to the last catcher?” you asked your boss during your sole interview.
“Couldn’t handle the pressure.” “Where do the kids come from?”
He shrugged. “Everywhere? No one truly knows. They just appear, and we do what we have to do.”
“And what, exactly, is that?”
“Keep them innocent for as long as humanly possible.” “Okay,” you said. “I can handle a little pressure.”
“You’ll need peak conditioning and an unnerving ability to absorb punches,” he said. “Some of the kids simply trip and fall, don’t know what hit them. But some jump of their own accord. They’re the ones who really don’t want to go back.” He yawned and glances at the door, ready to eject me and move on. He probably didn’t have children of his own. He probably liked complaining about them on airplanes.
You spoke of your track days in college, and you waved your long arms a bit, as if to show you could still move.
He studied you, then nodded. “Keep in mind,” he said, “there are others who don’t trip or jump; they’re pushed.”
“What do you mean?
He lowered his voice. “You know, by a parent, a babysitter, or a creepy relative. Or, like, a pastor.”
“Oh,” you whispered, then you went home to cry yourself to sleep.
On day one, the rye field stretches endlessly before you, the sun setting the grass in a warm orange glow. You marry your skin to a farmer’s tan. By day two you shed your shirt and catch all the children while wearing a binder, which begins to bite into you. You move more slowly; you’re short of breath, still unsure how to read those online size charts, those tiny numbers born of a culture that seems to worship string and tape. Regardless, the kids don’t mind the exposed skin; they’re delighted to have you dangle them upside down, tickle their armpits and bellies and the bottoms of their feet, to have you “eat them up” and send them into wild shrieks. They beg for more.
“Turn me into slime,” they demand.
“Call me a booger,” they insist. “Again, again,” they beg.
And you comply, every single time. You try not to think about which children had their childhood trimmed away because of power and who still holds it. You love them all, perhaps too much, too hard; you want to keep them as your own, even though that isn’t how this works.
You briefly wonder whether you went through something like this, who might have caught you and when. Or did you slip through others’ arms into the jaws of adolescence? There is a blank space where your own childhood should be. You don’t know what that means, but you know it can’t be good.
When you catch them—the orange dust of Cheetos on their faces, the ketchup on their cheeks, the missing teeth, the peanut-butter on fingers, the dirt from stepping in dog waste with bare feet—you picture yourself delivering the performance of a lifetime. You imagine the world’s most beautiful people watching, covering their mouths in awe, moved to tears by your recital of joy and innocence, of catching and returning, as if you were a disciplined fisherman. You imagine your beauty the way the beautiful people see it: unrestrained, pure, noble.
You, with your long reach and iron will, toss the kids hundreds of feet into the air, back to the edge of the cliff, where they can return to their playhouses, secret gardens, and faith in the intoxicating power of laughter, back to their adults and bedtimes and the belief that good always wins, that evil is a wicked old witch in the woods and not the estate planner next door or the man sleeping just a room away.
But after a few weeks you’re worn to the bone, sunburnt, heatstroked, uninspired. Provincetown comes and goes, and you go with it—too much watching and not enough approaching, too much judgment, too much denial: not them, not her, and certainly not her. You crave something ineffable, something that feels more like absence than a body. You drink whatever you can find—shots, cocktails, frozen drinks that give you a brain freeze—but never rye whiskey. There are kids at the parades and on the boats. Everywhere you look, families, bodies resting on bodies, hands clasping hands. You won’t make eye contact; you won’t linger on their sweet faces in case you someday recognize them in your arms. It would be too much, to know them from the outside world.
Anyway, your legs grow weary and shaky, your joints ache, and your quota drops. You let more kids slip through your arms into adolescence wherever you go—in big cities and small towns, the adulting of children rises, even among the well-off, even those raised with gentle care, even those who attend camps and have college funds to spare.
All at once, six-year-olds speak like grown-ups: I’ll work until I die; how are the interest rates today?; I can’t believe tax season is back again; chores and errands can’t be all there is to life; I’m not sure I’ll ever know real happiness; If love is real, I’ve never felt it.
They abandon play that built worlds—family, magic, swamp monsters, dragons, dinosaurs—and time becomes a threat, a sharp edge; time is linear now, an edge from which there is nowhere to retreat except forward.
The kids you still manage to catch say things like, “Oh, you date all genders? Neat, where’s your belly button?” and “You aren’t a boy or a girl, cool—want to see me lick my foot?”
The ones you miss—the ones you can’t grab because it’s all too much—the endless sprint, the hands dragged through tall grass, the shouts behind you, “You’re fucking disgusting, no one’s gonna want you!” and “We used to be a proper country!” and “I hope someone beats your face in.”
That should bother you, but it’s almost a relief. A sign that babies aren’t born hating the world with their first cries.
Here’s what you don’t do: you don’t resign, even as you receive warnings, even as the kids keep slipping away, even as you insist this job would demand thousands rather than one. You don’t quit as playgrounds bleed empty and swings groan with ghosts. You don’t step down, though you know you should accept failure.
What you do: you call your ex-wife and leave a voicemail about how all the children resemble neither you nor the ones you two never had, about how some are pushed by someone they trust. And how the fortunate ones are blindfolded and guided to the edge so they can’t see who pushed them. When you catch them and return them to childhood, they don’t have to know, they don’t have to face that knowledge, of being told to love anyway, despite everything. Perhaps one day they’ll be like you—a person who appears to have sprung into adulthood without a known childhood to remember.
You tell her in the voicemail that you can’t identify who pushes them—the faces are too distant, and none resemble the villains kids are taught to fear. At night, after you sit on the porch and watch the sky through the wasted trees, after you swallow pills for sleep and pain, after you read with dim light, after you finally close your eyes and tally the children tumbling off the cliff—one, two, three, four—and drift off somewhere around five hundred, you dream a red-hot, devouring dream. You dream of pinpointing those faces, once and for all. You dream of hair torn from scalps, your knee smashing a cheekbone, left hook, right hook, floor, teeth scattered like Skittles. You dream of a violence so innate, so instinctive, that it should make you fear yourself. But it doesn’t. It excites you; this is what you were made for: not catching but avenging. You dream of bodies striking the ground, of a victory that no one sees but everyone can feel.
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