Today blue skies birthed seventy degrees after days of chilly weather.

I took my four year old to our favorite park.  We like to go during the day when all the “big” kids are at school.

When we arrived, there were about twenty parents, and probably thirty children.  It is a large park with two major areas of primary colored plastic play equipment and a sand pit in the middle.  It wasn’t crowded.

There are several blue rubber coated benches placed strategically around the park for parents whose children actually let them sit down while they play.

I hoped to utilize one of those uncomfortable benches while my son played in the sand pit. 

Gavin, compelled by some inner impulse to run with abandon everywhere he needs to go, sprinted across the first play area anxious to get to the sand pit and the group of little girls playing there. 

I trailed behind, as I so often do with my four year old.  The park was full of the normal noise, kids laughing, screaming, playing, moms chatting, an occasional whine. 

Before I was half way to the empty bench by the sand pit, I passed three different children who were hurt and crying.

The first, a brown haired five year old, was screaming because of sand in his eyes.  His mother rinsed them with a water bottle, but nothing helped.  As I passed she was rounding up the other children so they could go home.

Not more than five steps later, another child, this time a pretty blond girl in a red dress was kicked in the nose while coming down the slide.  She was screaming her nose was “on fire.”

Just before I reached my bench, a boy running on the concrete path beside the play area fell and skinned both his knees and his forehead.  He started wailing.

I sat down and thought.  Good grief what is going on?  Why are there so many kids getting hurt here today?  Before I could even examine my thought another child flipped out of a swing and started screaming.

Call me crazy but I felt like the kids were being stalked.  Stalked by some unseen force bent on hurting them.  The thought came slow, first on the peripheral of my mind after the second mishap, then slinking front and center after the fourth.

I equate the realization with another experience.  When I first started to know God, sometimes in the middle of the night I awoke thinking about someone.  Sometimes it was a friend, sometimes it was a church member I didn’t know but by sight, and sometimes it was more general.

I lay in bed for awhile thinking about the person and wondering when the heck I would go back to sleep.  Then it occurred to me over a period of time that maybe, just maybe, I was being awakened to pray for the person.  It wasn’t an earth shattering revelation, more a click of a thought which tickled the peripheral of my mind for weeks.  From that point on, whenever I awoke with someone on my mind, I prayed for them and was able to go back to sleep.

Today after 5 children were hurt within ten minutes, I felt that subtle click.  Somehow the sunny playground seemed more ominous to me, and my imagination went wild.

D.I.T., an acronym coined by a gal pal, stands for “demons in training.”  As in, little “not quite demons” doing everything they can to make life harder.  It was a phrase we used to convey “everything that can go wrong today (or this morning), has.”  It isn’t theology, or a belief, just a kind of inside joke based on the belief that there are unseen principalities which affect our reality.

My mind conjured Dits stalking the children, but they didn’t quite fit.   They may take your socks, hide your keys, give you a flat tire, things that delay and annoy.  They don’t actually harm anyone.

It takes something darker to hurt children.  Something unleashed.

So I wondered if maybe there was an Accident Demon.  (Maybe he got the job accidentally…hahaha.)

In the way I sometimes “know” when my son needs me even though I can’t hear him calling, or the way I “know” my husband is going to call, or the way I “know” someone will unexpectedly visit, well today I “knew” an Accidental Demon was stalking the kids on the playground.  I also “knew” it would draw first blood.

After a little while, I scoffed at my own imagination (because I often make story lines out of daily events), but not before I thought…Well, if there is something stalking these kids, mine will be the one to draw blood.  We just seem to roll like that.

I heard another kid scream across the park.  I’m not kidding.  It was eerie, in a perfectly beautiful setting.

It was time to swing so we headed across the sand pit to the swing set.  As I pushed my son I realized most of the other parents were off the benches and closer to their children.  Like maybe they sensed the Accidental Demon on the peripheral of their consciousness.  There was something because a garbage truck about three acres away thumped a large industrial garbage can, and I saw more than one mom jump at the sound.

Or maybe the Accidental Demon was all in my head.  After all, I was conjuring visions of the children’s guardian angels in battle with the Accidental Demon’s minions.  (What?  I spend a lot of time at play grounds.  Give a girl a break.)

When we headed to the slide it happened.  I heard what sounded like a large child somersaulting down the tallest bright yellow plastic slide.  Except it wasn’t the slide, and it wasn’t a large child.

A curly headed girl, maybe four years old, was climbing a circle of metal bars which reached well over eight feet high.  The children get in the middle of the circle and climb the rings.  There is a hole at the top giving access to several different slides.  The bars are close together for easy climbing and no sharp edges.

I watched as in slow motion.  She fell from the top all the way to the ground on the inside of the metal ring, hitting each metal rung with the back of her head.  She hit the mulch/sand with such force it sounded like a hollow drum.

I am not exaggerating when I say every single person on the play ground, from the smallest child to the oldest adult, stopped and looked toward the sound.  There was a collective breath holding, as if everyone was waiting for the scream to notify us she was still alive.

The scream never came.

Moms sprung into action.

Her parent’s were right there.  I was close so I ran to her.  A woman with a cell phone called 911.  Her dad was holding her when I got to them.  Blood was shooting out of the back of her head and the little girl was crying, but silently, in an I’m-hurt-but-not-totally-here kinda way.

Two women ran to their vehicles and grabbed first aid kits.  (I was really impressed at how prepared everyone seemed to be.)  The dad applied direct pressure and kept the girl calm, but her head, like most head wounds, was bleeding profusely.

Everything on the playground stopped.  The kids fell silent and even my always active son was still.

The ambulance arrived a few minutes later and she was transported to the ER.

Several people left after that.

I walked over to where she fell and kicked mulch and sand over all the blood so the kids wouldn’t track through it.

Then just to be safe, I offered up a prayer of protection for the remaining children.

I walked my son to the van.

It felt like walking off a battle field.