I hunch over the park bench and stare down a dispersal of auburn cigarette butts that have somehow, in their disposal, landed in a neat row—nicotine crops in a gravel field. As I lean, my feet slide across the rocks and create brown streaks which remind me of those crush cookie bits in ice cream cakes.

It is a gray, downcast day, and the wind spares me no mercy in my winter coat and sturdy denim. I don’t expect it to. I deserve to be handled coldly. I could sit here forever and let the wind beat me down and it still wouldn’t be enough.

I look across the playground—empty. Hollow as a grave. The sky presses down on the jungle gym bones like a glum new skin.

My eyes return back to the floor, where they belong. I refocus on the cigarette butts. There is a pattern in the gravel, a message. How did I miss it before? They spell out: TINMAN, each butt an ashy beam holding the word together.

I jump up and look around frantically. Wind whirls in my ears. Who would write this? Is someone watching m—and then, I remember.

A tear escapes from my left eye; I let this one go.

I drop on all fours. I stretch my jaw and hear a pop. And I chew down every last butt and the gravel rocks around them. The carcinogens are bitter and sharp on my tongue. Tar smudges my teeth as each filter unravels.

As I swallow they echo on the way down—tink, tink, tink. Familiar, like a mobile creaking over an empty crib.

I see white.

When I wake up, I feel the indents of rocks in my cheek. I wipe them off, and feel the impression—it is another phrase, written in dirt. TIME, etched into my skin—another scarlet letter, another bridge to throw myself over, despite how hard I try to cross.

-Isaiah Rivera