TE19 Iberian Adventure

Gabi Csutak

held my breath, everything became so quiet I could have been standing in the middle of a frozen lake. I decided it was better to stepout onto the street. Therewas a playground opposite like the one next to the school, but I couldn’t see any yellow walls anywhere. I headed straight for the sandpit. With my nails I scraped out a hollow in the hardened heap and tipped everything that was in my pockets into it. It took only a second for the coins and lip balm jars to fill the hole. I scraped sand over it all like dogs do and tried to flatten the top, but it still bulged like a fresh grave. It was then that the three children appeared. I thought this time I was really going to caught red-handed, but they weren’t even looking at me. They were storming the globe- shaped climbing-frame in themiddleof the playground. As they climbed onto it, the iron structure tipped, then rolled easily off its concrete base. The smallest child stepped into the middle of the globe, and the other two started to roll it along. The boy inside it moved incredibly quickly, always trying to hold onto the metal bar farthest from the ground. But the other two pushed the climbing frame along ever more quickly, and, what’s more, from time to time would suddenly change direction. The one inside began to slow down, getting banged this way and that in the globe- shaped cage, and sometimes coming really quite close to the ground. Any second now, the globe would tip onto his fingers. He shouted something to the others, but they only rolled the globe onwards all the more wildly. I nearly burst out to them to stop. In the end, I thought it better to move 232