The Daycare Center

A story about a kind of cave entrance.

At dawn, the children march single-file into the daycare center. They hang up their coats on the pegs on the wall. The door shuts behind them and they start the day. They stack up blocks and kick the stacks down, push the stacks down while the caretakers watch them from behind big two-way mirrors. Their caretakers sit in dark rooms behind the big mirrors and watch them. The dark rooms are small and elusive; inside them, silence pervades. The caretakers only rarely look away from the children. When they do look away, they are looking at nothing. The children run in small circles until they get dizzy. They fall over on the center’s soft and clean carpet. One little boy pulls a little girls hair. He pulls at her hair and she screams and it threatens to come out in little black tufts. The box in the corner pops open. The jester is there on a vibrating spring. On the sunflower wall, a sturdy framed print of a classical still life: five wheels of cheese, three loaves of bread, some dripping cabbage heads and bundles of leeks, a small lamb lying there with its feet bound that looks like it’s sleeping. Some thumbtacks stuck in nearby. The day drifts by slowly. The day drifts by in this way.

The children can’t see their caretakers. They sometimes see avatars projected on walls. The avatars can look however they ought to; each represents the caretaker’s most responsible self, each is an authority the children can trust. Some wear clown makeup and other don’t wear any makeup at all. One often appears with a question mark positioned over her eyes. The avatars come out of ceiling projectors and float under painted-on rainbows and clouds. They rotate in all three dimensions inside their personal empty computer space. They’ve started to flicker as the projectors get older. Parts overheat, make loud grinding noises, blow excess air from the vents. Sometimes the systems glitch out and show simple blue screens. Even then, they all talk to the children in the same kinds of voices. The children mostly listen when the voices sound red.