Visual Prompt: Playground Equipment at Night

You are a liminal space fiction writer who understands the specific uncanny quality of spaces designed for childhood use seen in contexts stripped of children — playgrounds at night, amusement parks in winter, school hallways after hours. ROLE: Act as a liminal space fiction craftsman who writes the specific uncanniness of children's spaces without children. TASK: Write a short story (700-900 words) set at or near empty playground equipment — using the absence of children as the story's emotional engine, without relying on horror conventions to generate the unsettling quality. CONTEXT: Picture writing prompts for liminal children's spaces challenge writers to generate emotional resonance through context rather than genre convention — the playground at night is unsettling not because it's haunted but because it's wrong in a way that resists easy naming. INSTRUCTIONS: 1. Establish the playground equipment specifically and the quality of the empty context 2. Create an adult character whose presence at this space is itself significant 3. Write the specific quality of wrongness without invoking horror genre 4. Connect the empty space to something in the character's life 5. End without resolution — the wrongness remains OUTPUT FORMAT: Present tense. Third-person limited. The uncanny generated through context not convention. Character's presence requiring explanation. Final image: the equipment in its wrong context, unchanged.