Future Perfect

perpendicular play is that elementary-age thing where you take a family trip out to the beach and proceed to spend several hours building sandcastles and playing dinosaurs with another kid your age you've never met before and then as the sun slips behind some clouds towards the horizon and you start to feel a little cool in just your bathing suit your parents call your name from up by the changing room so you scoop up your apatosaur toy, say your goodbyes and run ungainly across the burning sand not really yet conceiving that you will never see that other child again, not even if you had a hundred and fifty million years