Dumbo. Or: This Might Be One of the Last Nice Days of the Year

According to the weather forecast it’s going to be one of the last nice days of the year before summer turns to autumn. A group of parents and children from the same class head for the playground for some sun, soft drinks and fun. At the top of the slide, a son pushes another boy down off the top. Everyone falls silent. Then the son laughs, as though relieved, standing at the top of the slide, like a demon. The other boy is rushed to hospital, where the doctors diagnose paraplegia. For the son’s family the day began in harmony and ended in a nightmare. The accident creates an unbearable silence that permeates the house for years. Their thoughts circle this moment endlessly, creating a lifelong search for answers: How could their son have been capable of such a horrific act? He becomes an unpredictable, foreign presence in his parents’ lives, sinister and dangerous. When he visits his parents years later as an adult, they freeze out of fear that their arduously constructed “family” could finally crumble into dust.