The Dark Somnium - "Penpal"

Episode Date: September 30, 2023

This is a classic creepypasta scary story, written by Dathan Auerbach (aka 1000Vultures) Check out the official book on amazon:"Penpal" https://a.co/d/dstyxVP Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is long, so I apologize for that. I've never had to tell this story with enough detail to actually explain it all the way, but it is true, and it happened when I was about six years old. In a quiet room, if you press your ear against a pillow, you can hear your heartbeat. As a kid, the muffled, rhythmic beat sounded like soft footsteps on carpeted floor. Almost every night, just as I was about to drift off to sleep, I would hear these footsteps. and I would be ripped back to consciousness, terrified. For my entire childhood, I lived with my mother in a fairly nice neighborhood that was in a transitional phase. People of lower economic means were gradually moving in, and my mother and I were two of these people.

We lived in the kind of house you see being transported in two pieces on the interstate, but my mom took good care of it. There were a lot of woods surrounding the neighborhood that I would play and explore during the day, But at night, as things often do to a kid, they took on a more sinister feeling. This, coupled with the fact that, due to the nature of our house, there was a fairly large crawl space underneath, filled my mind with imaginary monsters and inescapable scenarios which would consume my thoughts when I was awoken by the footsteps. I told my mom about the footsteps, and she said that I was just imagining things. I persisted enough that she blasted my ears with water from a turkey-based or one. once just to placate me, since I thought that would help.

Of course, it didn't. Despite all the creepiness and footsteps, the only weird thing that ever happened was that every now and then I would wake up on the bottom bunk, despite having gone to sleep on the top. But this wasn't really weird, since sometimes I'd get up to piss or get something to drink, and could remember just getting back to sleep on the bottom bunk. I'm an only child, so it didn't matter. This would happen once or twice a week, but waking up on the bottom bunk wasn't too terrifying. But one night, I didn't wake up on the bottom bunk.

I had heard the footsteps, but was too far gone to be woken up by them. And when I was awoke, it wasn't from the sound of footsteps or nightmare, but because I was cold, really cold. When I opened my eyes, I saw stars. I was in the woods. I sat up immediately and tried to figure out what was going on. I thought I was dreaming, but that didn't seem right, though neither did me being in the woods. There was a deflated pool float right in front of me, one of those ones shaped like a shark.

This only added to the surreal feeling, but after a while it seemed like I just wasn't going to wake up because I wasn't asleep. I stood up to orient myself, but I didn't recognize these woods. I played in the woods by my house all the time, so I knew them really well. if these weren't the same woods, then how could I get out? I took a step and felt a shooting pain in my foot, which knocked me back down where I had been laying. I had stepped on a thorn. By the light of the moon, I could see that they were everywhere. I looked at my other foot, but it was fine. As a matter of fact, so was the rest of me. I didn't have another scratch on me,

and it wasn't that dirty. I cried for a little bit, and then stood back up. I didn't know which way to go, so I just picked a direction. I resisted the urge to call out, since I wasn't sure I wanted to be found by who or what might be out there. I walked for what seemed like hours. I tried to walk in a straight line, and tried to course correct when I had to take detours, but I was a kid, and I was afraid. There weren't any howls or screams, and only once did I hear any noise that scared me.

It sounded like a crying baby. I think now that it was just a cat, but I panicked. I ran, veering in different directions to avoid big thickets of bushes and collapsed trees, and I was paying close attention to where I stepped, because by that point my feet were in pretty bad shape. I paid too much attention to where I was stepping, and not enough to where those steps were leading, because not long after hearing the cry, I saw something that filled me with the kind of despair I haven't experienced since.

It was the pool float. I was only ten feet from where I had woken up. This wasn't magic or some supernatural space bending. I was lost. Up until that moment, I thought more about getting out of the woods than how I got in, but being back at the beginning caused my mind to swim. I wasn't even sure that these were my woods. I had only been hoping that they were.

Had I run in a huge circle around that spot, or did I just get turned around and start making my way back? How was I going to get out? At the time, I thought the North Star was just the brightest star, and so I looked and found the brightest one and followed it. Eventually, things started to look more familiar. A dirt ditch my friends and I would have dirt-clod wars in. I knew I had made it home.

By that point, I was walking really slowly because my feet hurt so much, but I was so happy to be close to home that I broke into a light jog. I actually saw the roof of my house over a neighboring lower set house, I let out a light sob and ran faster. I just wanted to be home. I had already decided that I wouldn't say anything because I had no idea what I could possibly say. I would get back in the house somehow, clean up and get in bed.

My heart sank as I rounded the corner and my house came into view. Every light in the house was on. I knew my mom was up and I would have to explain or try to explain what. where I had been, and I couldn't even figure out where to start. My run became a jog, which became a walk. I saw her silhouette through the blinds, and although I was worried about how to explain things to her, that didn't matter to me at that point. I walked up the couple of steps to the porch and put my hand on the doorknob and turned.

Right before I pushed it open, two arms wrapped around me and pulled me back, I screamed as loud as I could. The feeling of being so close to being safe and then being physically pulled to it. All away from it filled me with the kind of dread that is, even after all these years, indescribable. The door I had been torn away from opened, and a flash of hope shot through my heart, but it wasn't my mom. It was a man, and he was enormous.

I thrashed around and kicked at the shins of the person holding me, while also trying to get away from the person who had just come out of my house. I was scared, but I was furious. Let me go. Where is she? Where's my mom? What'd you do with her? As my throat stung from screaming and I was drawing in another breath, I became aware of a sound that had been present for longer than I had perceived.

Honey, please calm down. I've got you. It sounded like my mom. The arms loosened and set me down, and as a man approaching me blocked out the porch light with his head, I noticed his clothes. He was a cop. I turned to face the voice behind me and saw that it really was my mom. Everything was okay. I began to cry, and the things. Three of us went inside. I was worried I'd never see you again. I'm sorry. I don't know what happened. I just wanted to come home. I'm sorry. It's okay.

Just don't ever do that again. I'm not sure me or my shins could take it. A little laughter broke through my mom's sobs and I smiled a bit. Well, I'm sorry for kicking you, but why'd you have to grab me like that? I was just afraid that you'd run away again. I was confused. What do you mean? We found your note on your pillow.

She said and pointed at the piece of paper that the police officer was sliding across the table. I picked up the note and read it. It was a running away letter. It said that I was unhappy and that I never wanted to see her or any of my friends again. The police officer exchanged a few words with my mom on the porch while I stared at the letter. I didn't remember writing a letter. I didn't remember anything about any of this. But even if I sometimes went to the bathroom at night and didn't remember, or even if I could have gone into the woods on my own, even if all of that could have been true.

The only thing I knew at this point was, this isn't how you spell my name. I didn't write this letter. When I was five years old, I went to an elementary school that, from what I've come to understand, was really adamant about the importance of learning through activity. It was part of a new program designed to allow children to rise at their own pace. And to facilitate this, the school encouraged teachers to come up with really inventive lesson plans. Each teacher was given the latitude to create his or her own themes, which would run through the duration of the grade, and all the lessons in math, reading, etc., would be designed

in the spirit of the theme. These themes were called groups. There was a space group, a sea group, an earth group, and the group I was in, community. In kindergarten in this country, you don't learn much except for how to tie your shoes and how to share, so most of it isn't very memorable. I only remember two things very clearly. I was the best at writing my name the right way, and the Balloon Project, which was really the hallmark of the community group, since it was a pretty clever way to show how

a community functioned at a really basic level. You've probably heard of this activity. On one Friday, I remember it being Friday because I was excited about the project. and it being the end of the week. Toward the beginning of the year, we walked into the classroom in the morning and saw that there was a fully inflated balloon tied off with a string taped to each of the desks. Sitting on each of our desks was a marker, a pen, a piece of paper, and an envelope. The project was to write a note on the paper, put it in the envelope, and attach it to the balloon,

which we could draw a picture on if we wanted. Most of the kids started fighting over the balloons because they wanted different colors. colors, but I started on my note, which I had thought a lot about. All the notes had to follow a loose structure, but we were allowed to be creative with those boundaries. My note was something like this. Hi, you found my balloon. My name is and I attend elementary school.

You can keep the balloon, but I hope you write me back. I like Mighty Max, exploring, building forts, swimming, and friends. What do you like? me back soon. Here's a dollar for the mail. On the dollar, I wrote four stamps right across the front, which my mom said was unnecessary, but I thought it was genius, so I did it. The teacher took a Polaroid of each of our balloons and had us put them in the envelope along with our letter. They also included another letter that I assume explained the nature of the project, and a sincere appreciation for anyone's participation in writing back and sending photos of their city or

neighborhood. That was the whole idea, to build a sense of community without having to leave school, and to establish safe contact with other people. It seemed like a fun idea. Over the next couple weeks, the letters started to roll in. Most came with pictures of different landmarks, and each time a letter would come in, the teacher would pin the picture on a big wall map we had put up, showing where the letter had come from, how far the balloon had traveled.

It was a really smart idea, because we actually looked forward to coming to school to see if we had gotten our letter. For the duration of the year, we had one day a week where we could write back to our pen pal, or another student's pen pal in case our letter hadn't come in yet. Mine was one of the last to arrive. When I came into the classroom, I looked at my desk, and once again didn't see any letter waiting for me. But as I sat down, the teacher approached me and handed me an envelope.

I must have looked so excited because as I was about to open it, she put her hand on mine to stop me and said, please don't be upset. I didn't understand what she meant. Why would I be upset now that my letter had come? Initially, I was mystified that she would even know what was in the envelope, but now I realized that of course the teachers had screened the contents to make sure that there was nothing obscene. But all the same, how could I be disappointed? When I opened the envelope, I understood.

There was no letter. The only thing in the envelope was a Polaroid, but I couldn't really make out what it was. It looked like a patch of desert, but it was too blurry to decipher. It appeared as if the camera had moved while the picture was being taken. There was no return address, so I couldn't even write back if I wanted to. I was crushed. The school year passed on, and the letters had stopped coming for nearly all of the other students. After all, you can only continue to write correspondence with a kindergartner for so long.

Everyone, including myself, had lost interest in the letters almost completely. Then I got another envelope. My excitement was rejuvenated, and I reveled in the fact that I was still getting a letter when most of the other pen pals had abandoned their involvement. It made sense that I received another delivery. There had been nothing but a blurry picture in the first one, so this one was probably to make up for that. But again, there was no letter at all, just another picture. This one was more distinguishable, but I still didn't understand it.

The photograph was angled up, catching the top corner of a building, and the rest of the image was distorted by a lens flare from the sun. Because the balloons didn't travel very far, and because they all were launched on the exact same day, the board had become a bit cluttered. And so, the policy for students still exchanging letters became that they could take the photographs home. My best friend Josh had the second highest number of pictures taken home by the end of the year. His pen pal was really cooperative and sent him pictures from all around the neighboring city.

Josh took home, I think, four pictures? I took home nearly 50. The envelopes were all opened by the teacher, but after a while, I stopped even looking at the pictures. However, I saved them in one of my drawers that housed my collection of rocks, baseball cards, book cards, Marvel metal cards for those who might remember, and little miniature baseball battling helmets that I'd gotten out of a vending machine at Win Dixie after T-ball games. With the school year over, my attention turned to other things.

My mom had gotten me a small snow cone machine for Christmas that year, and Josh had really coveted it, so much so that his parents bought him a slightly nicer one for his birthday, which was towards the end of the school year. That summer, we had the idea that we would set up a snow cone stand to make money. We thought we'd make a fortune selling snow cones at one dollar. Josh lived in a different neighborhood, but we eventually decided that my neighborhood would be better, because there were a lot of people who cared about their lawns. The yards in my neighborhood were slightly bigger. We did this for five weekends in a row until my mom told us we had to stop, and I've only recently come to understand why she did that. On the fifth weekend, Josh and I were

counting our money, because we both had a machine. Each had a separate stack of money that we could put together into one stack, and then we could split it evenly. We had made a total of $16, and as Josh paid out my fifth dollar, a feeling of profound surprise consumed me. The dollar said, four stamps. Josh noticed my shock and asked if he had miscounted. I told him about the dollar, and he said,

Ah, that's so cool, man. As I thought about it, I came to agree. The idea that the dollar had made it right back to me after changing so many hands floored me. I rushed to tell my mom, but my excitement, coupled with her being distracted by a phone call, made my story incomprehensible, and she responded simply by saying, Oh, wow, that's neat. Frustrated, I ran back outside and told Josh I had something to show him. Back in my room, I opened the drawer and took out the stack of envelopes and showed him some of the pictures.

I started with the first picture, and we went through about ten before Josh lost interest and asked if I wanted to go play in the ditch, a dirt ditch down the street from my house, before his mom came to pick him up, so that's what we did. We had a dirt war for a while, but it was interrupted several times by rustling in the woods around us. There were raccoons and stray cats that lived in there, but this was making a little too much noise, and we traded guesses as to what it was in an attempt to scare each other. My guess was that it was a mummy, but in the end, Josh kept insisting that it was a robot because of the sounds that we heard.

Before we left, he got a little serious and looked me right in the eyes and said, You heard it, didn't you? It sounded like a robot. You heard it too, right? I had heard it, and since it sounded mechanical, I agreed that it was probably a robot. It's only now that I understood what we heard. When we got back, Josh's mom was waiting for him at the kitchen table with the table. my mom. Josh told his mom about the robot. Our mom's laughed and Josh went home.

Mom and I ate dinner and then I went to bed. I didn't stay in bed for long before I crept out and decided that due to the day's events, I would revisit the envelope since now the whole affair seemed much more interesting. I took the first envelope and set it on the floor and set the blurry desert Polaroid on top. I laid the second envelope right next to it and placed the the oddly angled Polaroid of a building's top corner on top, and did this with each picture until they formed a grid that was about five by ten. I was always taught to be careful with the things I was collecting, even if I wasn't sure they were valuable.

I noticed that the pictures gradually became more decipherable. There was a tree with a bird on it, a speed limit sign, a power line, a group of people walking into some building, and then I saw something that vexed me so powerfully that I can And now, as I record this, distinctly remember feeling dizzy and capable of only one single repeating thought. Why am I in this photograph? In this photograph of the group of people entering the building, I saw myself holding hands with my mother in the very back of the crowd of people.

We were at the very edge of the photo, but it was undeniably us. And as my eyes swam over the sea of Polaroids, I became increasingly anxious. It was a really odd feeling. It wasn't fear. It was the feeling you get when you're in trouble. I'm not sure why I was flooded with that feeling, but there I sat, floundering in the distinct sense that I had done something wrong. And this feeling only intensified as I looked on at the rest of the photos after the one

that had so powerfully struck me. I was in every photo. None of them were close shots. None of them were only of me, but I was in every single one of them. Off to the side, in the back, bottom of the frame, some of them only had the tiniest part of my face captured at the very edge of the photo, but nevertheless, I was there, I was always there. I didn't know what to do.

Your mind works in funny ways as a kid, but there was a large part of me that was afraid of getting in trouble simply for still being up. Since I already had the looming feeling of having done something wrong, I decided that I would wait until tomorrow. The next day, my mom was off work and spent most of the morning cleaning up around the house. I watched cartoons, I imagined, and waited until I thought it was a good time to show her the Polaroids. When she went out to get the mail, I grabbed a couple of pictures and put them on the table

in front of me as I was waiting for her to come back in. When she returned, she was already opening the mail and threw some junk mail into the trash can, and I said, Mom, can you come here for a second? I have these pictures. Just give me a minute, honey. I need to mark these on the calendar. After a minute or two, she came and stood behind me and asked me what I needed. I could hear her shuffling with the mail behind me,

but I just looked at the Polaroids and told her about them. As I explained more and pointed to the pictures, her frequent and... Okay. Decreased, and she was suddenly completely quiet and only making a little noise with the male. The next noise I heard from her sounded as if she was trying to catch her breath, in a room that had no air in it. At last, her struggling gas were conquered, and she simply dropped the remaining mail on the table and ran to the kitchen to get the phone.

Mom, I'm sorry. I didn't know about these. Please don't be mad at me. With the phone pressed to her ear, she was walking and running back and forth and shouting into it. I nervously fiddled with the mail sitting next to my Polaroids. The top envelope had something sticking out of it that I thoughtlessly and anxiously pulled on until it came out.

It was another Polaroid. Confused, I thought that somehow one of my Polaroids had slipped into the stack when she threw the mail down. But when I turned it over and looked at it, I realized that I had not seen this one before. To my dismay, it was me. But this one was a much closer shot. I was surrounded by trees and smiling. But it wasn't just me, I noticed.

Josh was there too. This was us from yesterday. I started yelling for Mom, who was still screaming into the phone. I repeatedly yelled for her until she finally responded with... What! And I could only think to ask. Who are you calling? I'm talking with the police, honey.

But why? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do anything. She answered me with the response that I never understood until I was forced to revisit these events from the earliest years of my life. She grabbed the envelope off the table, and the picture of Josh and I spun and slid, landing next to the other polaroids in front of me. She held the envelope up to my eyes, but I could only look at her and watch

as all the color began draining out of her face. With tears welling in her eyes, she said that she had to call the police because there was no postmark. For those of you who have heard my other stories and asked if there was more and received cryptic answers from me, I want to apologize for being dishonest.

I said several times in the comments that nothing really happened after footsteps, but that wasn't true. The events of the following story weren't locked away in the recesses of my mind. I've always remembered them. It wasn't until I remembered balloons and spoke with my mother about the following events, but I realized how intertwined this story was with everything else. But I originally hadn't really planned on sharing this anyway.

My desire to withhold this memory was due mostly to the fact that I don't think I showed good judgment in it. I also wanted consent from another person to tell it. as to not misinterpret what transpired. I didn't expect there to be a lot of interest in my other stories, so I never thought I'd really get pressed for more details, and I would have been happy to keep this to myself for the rest of my life. I haven't been able to reach the other party, but I would feel disingenuous with holding this story from those who wanted more information, now that I've spoken with my mother, and another connecting line has been drawn.

What follows is as accurate a recollection as I can manage. I spent the summer before my first year of elementary school learning how to climb trees. There was one particular pine tree right outside my house that seemed almost designed for me. It had branches that were so low, I could easily grab them without a boost. And for the first couple days, after I first learned how to pull myself up, I would just sit on the lowest branch, dangling my feet, and was easily visible from the kitchen window, which was just above the sink. Before too long, my mother and I developed a routine where I would go play on the tree when she washed the dishes because she could easily see me while she did other things.

As the summer passed, my abilities grew, and before too long, I was climbing fairly high. As the tree got taller, its branches not only got thinner, but more widely spaced. I eventually reached a point where I couldn't actually climb any higher, and so the game had to change. I began to concentrate on speed, and in the end, I could reach my highest branch in 25 seconds. I got too confident, and one afternoon I tried to step from a branch before I firmly grasped the next one. I fell about 20 feet and broke my arm really badly in two places. My mom was running toward me yelling, and I remember her sounding like she was underwater.

I don't remember what she said, but I do remember being surprised at just how white my bone was. I was going to start kindergarten with a cast and wouldn't even have any friends to sign it. My mom must have felt terrible because the day before I started school, she brought home a kitten. He was just a baby and was striped with tan and white. As soon as she put him down, he crawled into an empty box of soda that was sitting on the floor. I named him Boxes. Boxes was only an outside cat when he escaped. My mom had him declawed, so he wouldn't destroy the furniture.

so as a result, we did our best to keep him inside. He'd get out every now and then, and we'd find him somewhere in the backyard, chasing some kind of bug or lizard, though he could hardly ever catch one because he had no front claws. He was pretty evasive, but we'd always catch him and carry him back inside. He'd scramble to look back over my shoulder. I told my mom that it was because he was planning his strategy for next time. Once inside, we'd give him some tuna fish, and he came to learn. what the sound of the can opener must signal. He'd come running whenever he heard it.

This conditioning came in handy later, because toward the end of our time in that house, boxes would get out much more often and would run under the house and into the crawl space, where neither of us wanted to follow, because it was cramped, and probably crawling with bugs and rodents. Ingeniously, my mom thought to hook the can opener to an extension cord out back, and run it right outside the hole that boxes had gone through. Eventually, he would imagine would emerge with his loud meows, looking excited by the sound and then horrified at how we could run such a cruel ruse on him. A can opener with no tuna made no sense to boxes. The last time he escaped to under the house was basically our last day in it. My mom had put the house on

the market and we began packing our things. We didn't have much and we stretched the packing out a while, though I had already packed up all my clothes at my mom's request. My mom could tell I was really sad about moving and wanted the transition to be smooth for me, and I guess she thought that having my clothes in the box would reinforce the idea that we were moving, but things wouldn't change that much. When boxes got out as we were loading some things into the moving van, my mom cursed because she had already packed the can opener and wasn't sure where it was. I pretended to go look for it so I wouldn't have to go under the house, and my mom, probably

completely aware of my little scam, moved one of the panels and crawled in. She came out with boxes pretty quickly and seemed pretty unnerved, which made me feel even better about getting out of it. My mom made some phone calls while I packed a little more, and then she came back into my room and told me that she had spoken to the realtor and that we were going to start moving into the other house that day. She said it like it was excellent news, but I thought we had more time in the house. She originally said we weren't moving until the end of next week, and it was only Tuesday.

More, we weren't completely finished packing. But Mom said sometimes it was just easier to replace things than pack them and haul them all over the city. I didn't even get to grab the rest of my boxed clothes. I asked if I could call Josh to say bye, but she said we could just call him from our new house, and then we left in the moving van. I managed to stay in touch with Josh for years, which is surprising since we no longer went to the same school.

Our parents weren't close friends, but they knew that we were, and so they would have accommodate our desire to see one another by driving us back and forth for sleepovers, sometimes every weekend. For Christmas one year, our parents even pooled their money to get us some really nice walkie-talkies that were advertised to work across a range that extended past the distances between our houses. They also had batteries that could last for days if the walkie-talkie was on, but not used. They would only occasionally work well enough that we could talk across the city, but

when we stayed over, we'd use them around the house. talking in mock radio speak that we had taken from movies, and they worked great for that. Thanks to our parents, we were still friends when we were ten. One weekend, I was staying over at Josh's, and my mom called me to say good night. She was still pretty watchful, even when she couldn't actually watch me, but I'd gotten so used to it that I didn't even notice, even if Josh did. She sounded upset. Boxes was missing.

This must have been a Saturday night, because I had spent the night at Josh's the previous night and was going to go home the next day because we had school on Monday. Boxes had been missing since Friday afternoon. I gathered that she had not seen him since returning home after dropping me off. She must have decided to tell me he was missing because if he didn't come home before I did, then I would be devastated at not only his absence, but how she could have kept it from me. She told me not to worry. He'll come back. He always does.

But boxes didn't come back. Three weekends later, I stayed at Josh's again. I was still upset about Boxes, but my mom told me that there had been many times when pets had disappeared from home for weeks or even months, only to return on their own. She said that they always knew where home was and would always try to get back. I was explaining this to Josh when a thought hit me so hard that I interrupted my own sentence to say aloud. What if Boxes thought of the wrong home?

Josh was confused. What? He lives with you. He knows where his home is. But he grew up somewhere else, Josh. He was raised in my old house a couple of neighborhoods away. Maybe he still thinks of that place as home like I do. Oh, I get it.

That'd be great. We'll tell my dad tomorrow and he'll take us over there so we can look. No, you won't, man. My mom said that we can never, ever go back to that place because the new owners wouldn't want to be bothered. She said that she told your mom and dad the same thing. Okay, then we'll just go out exploring tomorrow, Oh, make away to your old house.

No, if we get spotted, your dad will find out, and then so will my mom. We have to go there ourselves. We have to go there tonight. It didn't take much convincing to get Josh on board, since he was usually the one to come up with ideas like this. But we had never snuck out of his house before. It actually turned out to be incredibly easy. The window in his room opened to the backyard, and he had a latched wooden fence that wasn't

locked. After two minor hurdles, we slipped off into the night, flashlight and walkie-talkie. He's in hand. There were two ways to get from Josh's house to my old house. We could walk on the street and make all the turns or go through the woods, which would take about half the time. It would have taken about two hours to walk there taking the street, but I suggested that we go that way anyway.

I told him it was because I didn't want to get lost. Josh refused and said that if we were seen, they might recognize him and tell his dad. He threatened to go home if we didn't just take the shortcut. And I accepted it because I didn't want to go by myself. Josh didn't know about the last time I walked through these woods at night. The woods were so much less creepy with a friend and a flashlight, and we were making pretty good time. I wasn't entirely sure where we were, but Josh seemed confident enough, and that bolstered

my morale. We passed through a particularly thick patch of tangled trees when the strap on my walkie-talkie got caught in a branch. Josh had the flashlight, and so I was struggling to get up. get the walkie-talkie free when I heard Josh say, Hey man, want to go for a swim? I looked over to where he was shining the flashlight, though I closed my eyes as I did, because I now knew where we were. He was pointing at the pool float. This was where I had

woken up in those woods all those years ago. I felt a lump in my throat and the sting of fresh tears in my eyes as I continued to struggle with the walkie. Frustrated, I yanked on it hard enough to break it free, and I turned and walked to Josh, who had partially laid down on the pool float in a mocked sunbathing pose. As I walked toward him, I stumbled and nearly fell into a fairly large hole that was sitting in the middle of this small clearing. But I regained my balance and stopped right at its edge. It was deep. I was surprised by the size of the hole, but more surprised by the fact that I didn't remember it. I realized it must not have been there that night, because it was in the same spot where I had woken up.

I put it out of my mind and turned to Josh. Quit messing around, man. You saw I was stuck over there and you were just laying here joking around on this float. I punctuated the sentence with a kick to an exposed part of the float. A screeching rose from it. Josh's smile inverted. He suddenly looked terrified and was struggling to get off the float, but he couldn't in a quick manner due to the awkward way he was laying on it.

Each time he would fall back onto the float, the screeching would intensify. I wanted to help Josh, but I couldn't move myself any closer, and my legs wouldn't cooperate. I hated these woods. I picked up the flashlight that he had thrown in his thrashing and shined on the float, not knowing what to expect. Finally, Josh got off the float and rushed next to me, looking at where I was shining the light. Suddenly, there it was. It was a rat.

I started laughing nervously as we both watched the rat running to the woods, taking the screeches with it. Josh lightly punched me in the arm, the smile slowly returning to his face, and we continued walking. We quickened our pace and made it out of the woods faster than we thought we could, and we found ourselves back in my old neighborhood. The last time I had rounded the bend ahead, I had seen my house fully illuminated, and all the memories of what transpired came flooding back. I felt a skipping in my heart as we were finally turning the corner and about to face the full view of my house, remembering last time how incandescent it was.

This time, all the lights were off. From a distance, I could see my old climbing tree, and as my mind traced the steps of casualty backwards, I realized I wouldn't be back here this night if that tree hadn't grown, and I was briefly in awe of how all events were like that. As we got closer, I could see that the lawn looked terrible. I couldn't even guess when it had been last mowed. One of the shutters had partially broken loose,

and was rocking back and forth in the breeze, and overall the house just looked dirty. I was sad to see my old home in such a state of disrepair. Why would my mom care if we bothered the new owners if they cared so little about where they lived? And then I realized there were no new owners. The house was abandoned, though it looked simply forsaken. Why would my mom lie to us about our house having new people in it? But I thought that this was actually a good thing. It would be easier to look around for boxes if we didn't have to worry about being spotted

by the new family. This would make it quicker. Josh interrupted my thoughts as we walked through the gate and up to the house itself. Your old house sucks, dude. Josh yelled as quietly as he could. Shut up, Josh. Even like this, it's still nicer than your house. Hey, man.

Okay, okay. I think boxes are probably under the house. One of us has to go under and look, but the other should stay next to the opening in case he comes running out. Are you serious? There's no way I'm going under there. It's your cat, man. You do it. Look, I'll game you for it, unless you're too scared. I said, holding my fist over my upturned thumb. Fine, but we go on shoot, not on three. It's rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Not one, two, three. I know how to play the game, Josh. You're the one who always messes up. And it's two out of three. I lost. I wiggled loose the panel.

that mom would always move when she had to crawl under here for boxes. She only had to do it a couple of times since the can-opener trick usually worked, but when she had to do it, she hated it, especially the last time. And as I looked into the darkness of the crawl space, I had a greater appreciation for why. Before we moved, she said that it was actually better that boxes ran under here, despite how hard it could be to get him out. It was less dangerous than him jumping over the fence or running around the neighborhood. All that was true, but I was still dreading doing this.

I grabbed the flashlight and the walkie and began to crawl in. A powerful smell overtook me. It smelled like death. I turned on my walkie. Josh, are you there? This is macho man. Come back. Josh, cut it out.

There's something wrong down here. What do you mean? It stinks. It smells like something died. Is it boxes? I really hope not. I sat down the walkie. and move the flashlight around as I crawled forward.

Looking through the hole from the outside, you could see all the way back with the right lighting, but you had to be inside to see around the support blocks that held the house up. I'd say there was about 40% of the area that you couldn't see unless you were actually in the crawl space, but even inside, I discovered that I could only see directly where the flashlight was pointing. I realized that this would make scouting around the place much more difficult. As I moved forward, the smell intensified. The fear was growing in me that boxes had come here and something had happened to him. I shined the flashlight around, but couldn't see much of anything.

I wrapped my fingers around the support block to pull myself forward, and as I did that, I felt something that made my hand recoil. Fur. My heart sank, and I prepared myself emotionally for what I was about to see. I crawled slowly so I could prolong what I knew was coming, and I was. I inched my eyes and the flashlight passed the block to see what was on the other side. I staggered back in horror. Jesus!

Escapeed my trembling lips. It was a hideous and twisted creature, badly decomposed. Its skin had rotted away on its face so the teeth appeared to be enormous and the smell was unbearable. What is it? Are you okay? Is it boxes? I reached for the walkie-talkie. No, no, it's not boxes.

What the hell is it then? I don't know. I shined the light on it again and looked at it with far less fear in my vision. I chuckled. It's a raccoon. Well, keep looking. I'm going to go into the house to see if he might have made it in there somehow. What?

No, Josh. Don't go in there. What if Boxes is down here and runs out? He can't. I put the board back. I looked and saw that he was telling the truth. Why'd you do that? Don't worry, man.

You can move it easy. This makes more sense. If boxes ran out and I missed and then he'd be. be gone. If he's down there, then grab him tight, and I'll come move the board. And if he's not, then you can move it yourself while I look in the house. Some of his points were good, and I doubted he'd be able to get in anyway. Okay, but be careful. Don't touch anything. There's a bunch of my old clothes still in boxes in my room. You can look in there and see if he crawled in one, and make sure to bring your walkie. Roger that, good buddy. I realized it would be pitch black in there. The power

would have turned off since no one was paying the bill. With any luck, he'd be able to see from the street lights that might cast some light inside. Otherwise, I'm not sure what he'd do. Before too long, I heard footsteps right over my head and felt old dirt raining down on me. Josh, is that you? Bracker, braker, this is macho man. Coming back for the big tangled fox strike. Oh, yeah.

The eagle has landed. What's your 20, Princess Jasmine? Over. Asshole. Macho man, my 20 is in your back. After him looking at your stash of magazines. Looks like he got a thing for dudes' his butts. What's the report on that?

Over. I could hear him laughing without the walkie-talkie. Then I started laughing too. I heard footsteps fade away a little. He was on his way to my room. Man, it's dark in here. Hey, are you sure you had boxes of clothes in here? I don't see any.

Yeah, there should be a couple of boxes in front of the closet. There aren't any boxes in here. Let me check to see if maybe you put the box. I started thinking that maybe my mom had come back and gotten the clothes and just given them away because I had outgrown a lot of them, but I remembered leaving the boxes there. I didn't even have time to close the last one up before we left. While I was waiting for Josh to tell me what he found, I kicked out my leg, which had started falling asleep because of the position I was in and hit something.

I looked back and saw something really strange. It was a blanket, and all around it were bowls. I crawled a little closer. The blanket smelled moldy, and most of the bowls were empty, but one had something that I recognized still in it. Cat food. It was a different kind than we gave to boxes, but I suddenly understood. Mom had set up a little place for boxes to encourage him to come here instead of running around the neighborhood. That made a lot of sense, and it seemed even more likely that boxes would have come back to this place.

That's so cool, Mom, I thought. I found your clothes. Oh, cool. Where were the boxes? Like I said, there are no boxes. Your clothes are in your closet. They're hanging up. I felt a chill.

This was impossible. I had packed all my clothes, even though we weren't supposed to move for another two weeks when we left. I remembered packing them and thinking that it was stupid for me to have to get the clothes out of the box and put them back in. I had packed them, but someone had hummed. them up. Why, though? Josh needed to get out of there. That can't be right, Josh.

They're supposed to be in boxes. Stop messing around and just come back outside. No joke, man. I'm looking at them. Maybe you just thought that you left them. Wow. You sure like to look at yourself, don't you? What?

What do you mean? Your walls, man. Your walls are covered in polaroids of yourself. There are hundreds of them. What, did you hire someone to... Silence. I checked my walkie to see if I had switched it off somehow. It was fine.

I could hear footsteps, but couldn't tell exactly where Josh was going. I waited for Josh to finish his sentence, thinking that his finger had just slipped off the button, but he didn't continue. He seemed to be stomping around the house now. I was about to radio him when he came back. There's someone in the house. His voice was hushed and broken. I could hear he was on the verge of tears.

I wanted to respond, but how loud was his walkie turned up? What if the other person heard it? I said nothing and just waited and listened. What I heard were footsteps, heavy, dragging footsteps, and then a loud thud. Oh, God, Josh! He had been found. I was sure of it. This person had found him and was hurting him.

I broke out in tears. He was my only friend next to boxes. And then I realized, what if Josh told him I was under him? What could I possibly do? As I struggled to compose myself, I thankfully heard Josh's voice through the walkie. He's got something, man. It's a big bag. He just threw it on the floor and...

Oh, God. The bag. I think it just moved. I was paralyzed. I wanted to run home. I wanted to save Josh. I wanted to go for help. I wanted so many things, but I'd just lay there, frozen.

As I lay... Unable to move, my eyes focused on the corner of the house that was right under my room. I moved my flashlight. My breath hitched at what I saw. Animals, dozens of them, all dead. They lay in piles all around the perimeter of the crawl space. Could boxes be among these corpses? Was this what the cat food was for?

Seeing this broke my shock as I knew I had to get out of there and I scrambled to the board. I pushed on it, but it wouldn't budge. I couldn't move it because it was wedged in there, and I couldn't get my fingers around it since the edges were outside. I was trapped. God damn you, Josh! I whispered to myself. I could feel thunderous footsteps above me. The house was shaking.

I heard Josh scream, and it was matched by another scream that wasn't full of fear. As I continued pushing, I felt the board move, but I knew it wasn't me who was moving it. I could hear footsteps above me and in front of me and shouting and screaming, filling the brief silences between footsteps. I moved back and held my Waki ready to try to defend myself, and the board was thrown to the side, and an arm shot in and grabbed for me. Let's go, man! Now! It was Josh, thank God.

I scrambled out of the opening, holding the flashlight and the Waukee. When we got to the fence, we both jumped it, but Josh's Waukee fell. He reached for it, and I told him to forget it. We had to move. Behind us, I could hear yelling, though they weren't words, only sounds. And we, perhaps, foolishly ran for the woods to get back to Josh's quicker and be somewhat harder to follow. The whole way through the woods, Josh kept yelling. My picture! He took my picture!

But I knew the man already had Josh's picture from all those years ago at the ditch. I suppose Josh still thought those mechanical sounds were from a robot. We made it back to Josh's house and back into his room before his parents woke up. I asked him about the big bag and if it really moved, and he said he couldn't be sure. He kept apologizing about dropping the walkie at the house, but obviously that wasn't a big deal. We didn't go to sleep and sat peering out the window waiting for him. I went home later that day, as it was about 3 a.m. already. I told my mom the basics of this story the next day.

She broke down and was furious about the danger I put myself in. I asked her why she made up all those things about bothering the new. owners to try to stop me from going. Why did she think the house was so dangerous? She became irate and hysterical, but she answered my question. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it harder than I thought her capable of and locked her eyes to mine, whispering as if she was afraid of being overheard. Because I never put any fucking blankets or bowls under the house for boxes. You weren't the only one to find them. I felt dizzy and understood so much now. I understood what. I understood why she had looked so uneasy after she brought boxes out from under the house on our last day there.

She found more than spiders or rats' nest that day. I understood why we left almost two weeks early. I understood why she tried to stop me from going back. She knew. She knew he made his home under ours, and she kept it from me. I left without saying another word and didn't finish the story for her, but I want to finish it here, for you. I got home from Josh. that day. I threw my stuff on the floor and it scattered everywhere. I didn't care. I just wanted to sleep. I woke up around 9 p.m. to the sound of boxes meowing. My heart leapt. He had finally come home. I was a little sick about the fact that if I had just waited a day, none of the previous night's events would have happened and I'd have boxes anyway. But that didn't matter. He was back.

I got off my bed and called for him, looking around to catch a good. glint of light off his eyes. The crying continued, and I followed it. It was coming from under the bed. I laughed a little, thinking I had just crawled under a house looking for him and how this was so much better. His meows were muffled by his shirt, so I flung it aside and smiled, yelling, Welcome home, Boxes!

His cries were coming from my walkie-talkie. Boxes never came home. There was a comment on the last post that made me remember an event from my childhood that I always took as odd, but never considered it to be related to any of these stories. I know now that it is. It's funny how memory works. The details might all be present in your mind, though scattered and disarrayed, and then a single thought can stitch them back together almost instantly.

I never thought of these events much because I was focused on the wrong details. I went back to my mom's house and went through my old childhood schoolwork, looking for something that I think is important. I couldn't find it, but I'll keep looking. Most old cities and the neighborhoods in them weren't planned with the thought that the population would begin to grow exponentially, and it would have to be accommodated. The layout of the roads is generally originally in response to geographical restrictions

and the necessity of connection points of economic importance. Once the connecting roads are established, new businesses and roads are positioned strategically along the existing. skeleton, and eventually the paths carved into the earth are immortalized in asphalt, leaving room for only minor modifications, additions, and alterations, but never a dramatic change. My childhood neighborhood must have been old then. If straight lines move, as the crow flies, then my neighborhood must have been built based on the travels of a snake.

The first house is built must have been placed around the lake, and gradually the inhabited area increased as new extensions were built off the original path, but these new extensions all ended abruptly at one point or another. There was only one entrance, exit, for the entire neighborhood. Many of these extensions were limited by tributary, which both fed and drank from the lake, and passed right by what I call, and have called in these stories, The Ditch. Many of the original homes and enormous yards, but some of those original plots have been divided, Leaving properties with smaller and smaller boundaries.

An aerial view of my neighborhood would give one the impression that an enormous squid had once died in the woods, and some adventuring entrepreneur found the corpse and paved roads over its tentacles, only to withdraw his involvement and leave time, greed, and desperation to divide up the land among prospective homeowners, like an embarrassing attempt at the golden ratio. From my porch, you could see old houses that surrounded the lake, but the house of my house Mrs. Maggie was my favorite. She was, as best as I can remember, around 80 years old. But despite that, she was one of the friendliest people I'd ever met. She had a head of loose set, white curls, and always wore light dresses with floral patterns. She would talk to me and Josh from her back

porch when we were swimming in the lake, and she would always invite us in for snacks. She said that she was lonely because her husband Tom was always away on business, but Josh and I would always decline her invitation, because, as nice as Mrs. Maggie was, there was still something a bit odd about her. Every now and then, when we would swim away, she would say, Chris and John, you're welcome here anytime. And we could hear her still yelling that when we were walking back into my house. Mrs. Maggie, like many of the older homeowners, had a sprinkler system that was on a timer,

though at some point over the years her timer must have broken because the sprinklers would come on at various points during the day, and often, even at night, all year. While it never got cold enough to snow very much, several times each year I would go outside in the morning to see Mrs. Maggie's yard transformed into a surreal Arctic paradise by the frozen water. Every other yard stood sterilized and dry by the biting frost of winter's cold, but right there in the middle of the bleak reminder of the savagery of the season was an oasis of beautiful ice, hanging like stalactites from every branch, every tree, and every leaf of every bush.

As the sun rose, it reflected off, and each piece of ice splintered the sun into a rainbow that would only be viewed briefly before it blinded you. Even as a child, I was struck by how beautiful it was, and often Josh and I would go over there and walk on the iced grass and have sword fights with the icicles. I once asked Mom why she left it on like that. Mom seemed to search for an explanation before she said. Well, sweetie, Miss Maggie is sick a lot, and sometimes when she gets really sick, she gets confused. That's why she messes up yours and Josh's name sometimes. She doesn't mean to, but sometimes she just can't remember. She lives in that big house all by herself, so it's okay if you talk to her when you swim in the lake. But when she invites you in,

you should keep saying no. Be polite. Her feelings won't get hurt. But she's less lonely when her husband comes home, though, right? How long will he be away on business? It seems like he's always away. My mom seemed to struggle, and I could see that she had become very upset. Finally, she answered, Honey, Tom's not going to come home. Tom's in heaven.

He died years and years ago, but Mrs. Maggie doesn't remember. She gets confused and forgets. But Tom's not ever coming home. If someone moved back in with her, she might even think it was Tom. But he's gone, sweetie. I would have only been around five or six when she told me that. And while I didn't understand it completely, I was still profoundly sad for Mrs. Maggie. I know now that Mrs. Maggie had Alzheimer's.

She and her husband Tom had two sons, Chris and John. The two had worked out payment plans with utility companies and paid for Mrs. Maggie's water and electricity. but they would never visit her. I don't know if something happened between them, or if it was the illness, or if they just lived too far away, but they never came around. I have no idea what they looked like, but there were times when Mrs. Maggie must have thought that Josh and I looked like they did when they were children. Or maybe she saw what some part of her mind so desperately wanted her to see, ignoring the images

transmitted down her optic nerve, and just for a little while showing her what used to be. I realize only now how lonely she must have been. During the summer after kindergarten, before the events of balloons, Josh and I had taken to exploring the woods near my house, as well as the tributary of the lake. We knew that the woods between our houses were connected, and we thought it would be neat if the lake near my house was somehow connected to the creek around his, so we resolved ourselves to find out. We were going to make maps.

The plan was to make two separate maps and then combine them. We would make one map exploring the area around the creek near his house, and make another following the outflow from my lake. Originally, we were going to make one map, but we realized that wasn't possible, since I had started drawing the map out of my area so huge that the route from his house wouldn't have been to scale. We kept the map from the lake at my house, and the map from the creek at his house, and we would add to each one when we stayed the night with each other.

For the first couple weeks, it went really well. would walk through the woods along the water and pause every couple minutes to add to the map, and it seemed like the two maps would come together any day. We had no equipment needed for the job, not even a compass, but we tried to make do. We had the idea to impale the earth with a stick when we had reached the end of a venture, so if we came upon a stick from the other direction the next weekend, we would know that we had joined maps. We might have been the world's worst cartographers.

Eventually, however, the woods became too thick near the water coming from the lake, and we were unable to proceed further. We lost interest in the whole project for a bit, and reduced our exploration significantly, though not completely when we started selling snow cones. After I showed my mom all the pictures I had taken home from school, and she took away my snow cone machine, our interest in the maps revitalized. We had to come up with another plan. Although I didn't understand why, my mom had placed what I considered to be extremely severe

restrictions on what I could do and where I could go. I had to check in frequently if I went outside to play with Josh. This meant that we couldn't stay in the woods for hours and continue to look for a new path. We thought we could just swim when we got to the cut off in the woods, but that clearly wouldn't work since the map would get wet. We tried going faster when we were coming from Josh's house, but we eventually ran into the same problem. we had a brilliant idea. We'd build a raft. Due to the construction in the neighborhood,

there was a large amount of scrap building material that the company would set in the ditch to keep it out of the road and off-site, since they no longer needed it for building. We originally conceived of a formidable ship, complete with a mast and an anchor, but this quickly diminished into something more manageable. We set aside the wood and took several large pieces of styrofoam that were backed with foam board and tied them together with rope and kite-string. We launched our vessel a little down water from Mrs. Maggie and waved a farewell to her as she motioned us to come back her way, but there was no stopping us. The raft worked very well, and while we both behaved and spoke as if the functionality

of the raft was a given, I know at least I was a little surprised. We each had a fairly long tree branch to use as a paddle, but we found it was easier to simply push against the land under the water than actually used them as intended. When the water became too deep, we simply lie on our stuff. and use our hands to paddle the water, which still worked, albeit less well. The first time we had to resort to that method of propulsion, I remember thinking that from far above, it must have looked like a colossally fat man with tiny arms was out for a swim. It actually took us several trips to get the raft of the impassable patch of woods that marked

the farthest we'd made it. After we had come up with the idea of marking the ground with the stick, we had taken to running through the woods until we got to the stick, and then, as carefully and precisely as we could, charting our course. This meant that the impasse was actually quite a bit away. So to sail around my house all the way back to the blockade in the woods was taking longer than expected. We'd sail for a bit, then dock the raft, and then next time we'd run through the woods to the raft and go a little farther. We continued this well into first grade. Josh and I were assigned to different groups that year, So since we didn't really see one another during the school day, our parents were more willing

to let us hang out all weekend each week. What's more, Josh's dad had taken on a lengthy construction job that required him to work over the weekends, and his mom was on call. So this meant that Josh would stay at my house most every weekend for weeks on end. We should have been making excellent progress, but when we finally made it to the impasse and had the opportunity to explore past it, we couldn't find a place to dock the raft. The woods were simply too thick, and the water had eroded the land to the point where there was nearly a two-foot rise of earth, which exposed the twisting and damp roots of the trees above.

We'd have to turn back each time and leave the raft at the same thick of trees that prompted us to build it in the first place. Even worse, winter had arrived, so we couldn't justify leaving the house in our swimsuits. We were getting nowhere. We always had to come home before we could gain much ground. On Saturday, around 7 p.m., Josh and I were playing when one of my mom's co-workers knocked on the door. Her name was Sarah, and I remember her well now because I would propose to her a couple of years later when I was visiting my mom at work. My mom said that she had to go to work to fix a problem that had arisen, and that she'd be back in about two hours.

Her car was being repaired, so she'd have to ride with Samantha. But I gathered that the problem was Samantha's fault, and discussing it in the car was why it would only be. take two hours. She sat under no circumstances were we to leave the house or open the door for anyone, and she was in the middle of explaining that she would call every hour when she got there to check in, but she ended that statement prematurely when she remembered that our phone had been turned off for delinquent payments. This was why Samantha had just come by unannounced. She looked me dead in the eye as she was closing the door and said, Stay put. This was our chance. We watched her drive down the serpentine road,

toward the exit, and as soon as the car rounded the last visible bend, we ran back to my room. I dumped my backpack out while Josh grabbed the map. Hey, do you have a flashlight? No, but we'll be back way before dark. I was thinking just in case we should have one. My mom has one, but I don't know where she keeps it. Wait, I ran into my closet and pulled a box from the top shelf. Do you have a flashlight in there?

Josh asked. Not exactly. I opened the box and revealed three Roman cameras. candles that I had taken from the pile that my mother had amassed for the 4th of July this past summer, along with a lighter that I had managed to take some months before. This would ensure that we at least had some light if we needed it. This was a little before I had given an opportunity to be afraid of the woods at night, so it wasn't fear that motivated our search for a light source, only practicality.

We threw it in the backpack and bolted out of the door, making sure to close it so boxes wouldn't get out. We had one hour and 50 minutes. We ran through the woods as fast as we could and made it to the raft in about 15 minutes. We had our bathing suits on under our clothes, so we stripped off our shirts and shorts and left them in two separate piles about four feet from the edge of the water. We untied the raft from the tree, grabbed our branch paddles, and cast off. We tried to move rapidly to reach the point beyond the contents of our ever-expanding map, as we didn't have time to waste seeing old sites. We knew that we were slower in the raft than on land,

and that we would be in the raft for quite a while after the cutoff, since the woods were too thick to walk through, and there wasn't a place to dock. This meant that we'd have to ride the raft back to the original docking site, even if we found a new place to dock it further ahead. After we passed the last charted part of our map, the water began to get really deep, and eventually we could no longer touch the bottom with our tree branch, So, we lay on our stomachs and paddle with our hands.

It was getting dark, and as a result, it was becoming harder to distinguish the trees from one another, and we were both becoming slightly unnerved. In the interest of making good time, we were paddling fast with our arms, but this caused a lot of noise as our hands repeatedly confronted and then broke through the water's surface tension. During these periods, we both could hear crunching of dead leaves and the snapping of fallen sticks in the woods to our right. As we would slow our pace and quiet our actions, the rustling of the woods would cease,

and we began to wonder if it was really there at all. We didn't know what kind of animals resided this far into the woods, but we did know that we didn't wish to find out. As Josh amended the map that I was illuminating with the lighter, we were suddenly confronted with the fact that the sounds were not imagined. Rapidly and rhythmically we heard. It seemed to be moving slightly away from us, pushing through the woods just beyond our map.

It had become too dark to see. We had misjudged how long the sun would linger. Nervously, I called out. Hello? There was a brief moment of breathless tension as we lay static in the water. The silence was suddenly broken by laughter. Hello.

Hello, Mr. Monster in the woods. I know you're sneaking around, but maybe you'll answer to my hello. Hello. I realized how stupid it was. Whatever animal it was, it wouldn't respond. I hadn't even realized I'd said it until afterwards, but if anything was actually there,

I obviously wouldn't get a reply. Josh continued. Hello! Hello! I countered in as deep a baritone as I could manage. Hello there, mate. Hello, beep, boop. We continued mocking each other,

and were in the process of turning the raft around to head back when we heard, as if it were powered by the last breath of a pair of deflating lungs. But it didn't sound sickly. It had come from the spot just off the map, which now sat behind us since we turned the raft around. I slowly shifted on the raft and faced the direction of the sound as I fumbled with the Roman candle. I wanted to see. What are you doing? But I had already lit it. As the sparking fuse sunk into the wrapper, I held it toward the sky. I'd never actually shot one. one of these myself and thought it was just like a little flare in the movies. A glowing green

orb rocketed out towards the stars and then quickly extinguished. I lowered my arm more toward the horizon. I could remember that there were several colors, but I couldn't remember how many times one of these fired before being depleted. A second ball of red light burst out and fizzled above the trees, but I saw nothing. Let's just go, man. Josh pressed as he turned to face the direction back home and began paddling desperately. Just one more! Lowering my arm directly at the woods in front of me, another red ball of fire was launched from the tube. It traveled straight ahead until it collided with a tree, briefly exploding the light in a much greater diameter. Still nothing. I dropped the firework in the

water and watched as one more struggling fireball burst free only to quickly die, suffocated by the water. As we began paddling in the direction towards my house, we heard a loud and under Unconcealed rustling in the woods. The breaking of branches and the trampling of fallen leaves overpowered the sound of our splashing. It was running. In our panic, we jolted the raft too violently, and I felt one of the ropes under my chest loosened. Josh, be careful! But it was too late.

Our raft was breaking. Before too long, it had completely fallen apart. We each held on to two separate pieces of styrofoam, but the pieces weren't big enough to keep us completely afloat. and our legs dangled beneath us in the winter water. Josh, quick! I yelled as I pointed at the water right next to him. He scrambled, but it was too cold to move quickly, and we both watched as the map floated away.

I'm cold, man. Josh shuddered, dejectedly. Let's get out of the water. We approached the shore, but each time we attempted to pull ourselves up, we heard the frantic rustling thundering toward us from the woods just above. Eventually, we were too cold and weak to even try anymore. Steadily, we kicked our legs and found ourselves nearing the dock.

We toppled off the debris and tried to pull it on land, but Josh's piece slid away and floated in the direction of the lake. We took off our swimsuits and were desperate to get into dry clothes to shield us from the biting chill of the air. I slid my shorts, but there was something wrong. I turned to Josh. Where's my shirt, man? He shrugged and suggested,

Maybe it got knocked into the water and floated into the lake? I told Josh to go back to my house and say that we were playing hide-and-seek if my mom was home. I had to try to find my shirt. I ran behind the houses and peered out over the water and scouted along the shoreline. It occurred to me that with any luck, maybe I could find the map too. I was moving pretty fast because I needed to get home and was about to give up when my concentration was interrupted by a sound coming from just behind. me.

Hello? I whipped around and it was Mrs. Maggie. I had never seen her out at night before, and in this poor light she looked exceedingly frail. The usual warmth that rapt her manners seemed to have been snuffed out by the chill. I couldn't remember ever seeing her without a smile, and so her face looked strange. Hello, Mrs. Maggie. Oh, hi, Chris. I couldn't see it was you in the dark there.

I asked if she was going to invite me in for a snack, but she said maybe another time. I was too busy looking for my map and the shirt to really engage her, but she sounded happy, so I didn't feel bad. She said a couple of other things, but I was too distracted to pay attention. I said goodnight and ran down her driveway to my house. Behind me, I could hear her walking across the frozen grass, but I didn't turn around to wave. I had to get home. I made it home a couple of minutes before my mom did, and by the time she came in, Josh and I had already changed clothes and warmed up.

We'd gotten away with it, even though we'd lost the map. Josh asked me if I was able to find it. Nah, but I saw Mrs. Maggie. She called me Chris again. I'm telling you, dude, just be glad you've never seen her at night. We both laughed, and he asked me if she invited me in for a snack, joking that the snacks must be terrible, since she couldn't even give them away. I told him that she didn't, and he was surprised, and now that I had had time to think about it, so was I. Literally every time we had seen her, she invited us in for snacks, and here I had,

albeit sarcastically, invited myself, and she said no. As Josh talked more about Mrs. Maggie, I suddenly realized that the lighter might still be in my pocket, and that it would be disastrous for my mom to find. I grabbed my shorts off the floor and patted my pockets. I felt something, but it wasn't the lighter. From my back pocket, I slid out a folded piece of paper, and my heart leapt. The map, I thought, but I'd watched it float away. As I unfolded the paper, my stomach turned as I tried to understand what I was seeing.

Drawn on the paper, inside a large oval, were two sticks holding hands. One was much bigger than the other, but neither had faces. The paper was torn, so part of it was. missing, and there was a number written near the top right corner. It was either 15 or 16. I nervously handed Josh the paper and asked him if he had put it in my pocket at some point, but he scoffed at the idea and asked why I was so upset. I pointed toward the smaller stick figure and what was written next to it.

It was my initials. I shook it off and told Josh the rest of the conversation between Miss Maggie and I. I had always attributed the odd exchange to her being said. until revisiting the events in my mind all these years later. As I think about it now, the feeling of profound sadness for Mrs. Maggie returns, but it is augmented by the looming feeling of despair when I think about why she said maybe another time. I knew what she had said, but I didn't understand what it meant that night.

I didn't understand what her words had meant weeks later when I watched men in strange orange biohazard suits carry what I thought were black bags full of garbage out of her house. or why the whole neighborhood smelled like death that day. I didn't understand why they condemned the house and boarded it up a little while before we moved away. But I understand now. I understand why her last words to me were so important, even if neither she nor I realized it at the time.

Miss Maggie had told me that night that Tom had come home, but I know now who really moved in, just as I know why I never saw her body brought out on a stretcher. The bags weren't filled with garbage. I've intentionally withheld some details from a lot of my stories. I've let my hopes concerning the way things might be influence my evaluation of the way they actually are. I don't think there's any point to that anymore. At the end of the summer between kindergarten and first grade, I caught the stomach flu.

This has all the components of the regular flu. However, with the stomach flu, you throw up in a bucket and not a toilet because you're sitting on it. The sickness gets purged from both ends. This lasted for about ten days. My eyelids were so fused together by the dried mucus generated during the night that the first day I woke up with the infection, I thought I had gone blind. When I started first grade, I had a kink in my neck from ten days of bed rest and two swollen bloodshot eyes.

Josh was in another group and I didn't have my lunch, so in a cafeteria bursting with two hundred kids, I still had a table to myself. I started keeping spare food in my backpack that I would take into the bathroom and eat after lunch, since my school meals were usually confiscated by older kids, who knew that I wouldn't stand up to them, since no one would stand up to them. This dynamic persisted even after my condition cleared up, since no one wants to be friends with the kid who gets bullied, lest they have some of that aggression directed towards themselves. The only reason this stopped was due to the actions of a kid named Alex. Alex was in the third grade and bigger than most of the other kids in any grade. Around the first week of school, he started sitting with me at lunch, and this put an immediate end to the shortage of my food supply.

He was nice enough, but seemed kind of slow. We never really talked at length, except for when I finally decided to ask why he had been sitting with me. He had a crush on Josh's sister, Veronica. Veronica was in the fourth grade and was probably the prettiest girl in school. Even as a six-year-old, who fully endorsed the notion that girls were disgusting, I still knew how pretty Veronica was. When she was in third grade, Josh told me two boys had accidentally gotten into a fistfight, which erupted out of an argument concerning the significance of messages she had written in their yearbooks.

One of the boys eventually hit the other in the forehead with the corner of the yearbook, and the wound required stitches to close. While not one of those two boys, Alex wanted her to like him and confessed that he knew. Josh and I were best friends. I gathered that he hoped that I would convey his ostensibly philanthropic deed to Veronica, and that she would presumably be so moved by his selflessness that she'd take an interest in him. If I told her, he would continue to sit with me for as long as I needed him to. Because this was during the time when Josh mostly stayed at my house, building the raft

and navigating tributary with me, I didn't have a chance to bring it up to Veronica, because I simply didn't see her. I told Josh about it and he made fun of Alex, but said that he would tell his sister since I wanted him to. I doubted that he would. Josh was annoyed that people seemed to be so taken with his sister. I remember him calling her an ugly cow. I never said anything to Josh, but I remember wanting to say, even then, that she was pretty and would one day be beautiful. I was right.

When I was 15, I was seeing a movie at a place my friends and I had come to call Dirt Theater. It was probably nice at some point, but time and neglect had weathered the place severely. This theater had movable tables and chairs on a level floor, so when the theater was full, there were very few places you could sit and see the whole screen. The theater was still open, I imagine, for three reasons. It was cheap to see a movie there. They showed a different cult movie twice a month at midnight, and they sold beer to the underage kids during the midnight showings.

I went for the first two. And that night they were showing scanners by David Cronenberg for $1. My friends and I were sitting in the very back. I wanted to sit closer to the front for a better view, but Ryan had driven us, so I relented. A couple of minutes before the movie started, a group of girls walked in. They were all pretty attractive, but whatever beauty they might have had was eclipsed by the girl with dirty blonde hair. Even though I had only caught a glimpse of her profile, as she turned to move her seat,

I caught full view of her face, which gave me the feeling of butterflies in my stomach. It was Veronica. I hadn't seen her in a long time. Josh and I saw progressively less of one another after we snuck out to my old house that night when we were ten. And usually when I'd visit him, she'd be out with friends. While everyone stared at the screen, I stared at Veronica, only looking away when the feeling that I was being a creep overcame me. But that feeling would quickly subside and my eyes would return to her. She really was beautiful, just like I thought she'd be when I was a kid.

When the credits started to roll, my friends got up and left. There was only one exit, and they didn't want to be trapped waiting for the crowd to clear. I lingered in hopes of catching Veronica's attention. As she and her friends walked by, I took a chance. Hey, Veronica. She turned towards me, looking a little startled. Yeah? I got out of my seat and stepped a little into the light coming through the open door.

It's me. Josh's old friend from way back. How have you been? Oh my God, hey! It's been so long! She motioned her friends that she'd be out in a second. Yeah, a few years at least. Not since the last time I stayed over with Josh.

How is he anyway? Oh, that's right. I remember all you guys' games. Do you still play Ninja Turtles with your friends? She laughed a little, and I blushed. No, I'm not a kid anymore. Me and my friends play X-Men now. I was really hoping she'd laugh.

She did. You're cute. Do you come to these movies every time? I was still reeling from what she said. Does she really think I'm cute? Did she just mean I was funny? Does she think I'm attractive? I suddenly realized that she had asked me a question, and my mind grasped for what it was.

But yeah, I said much too loudly. Yeah, I try to anyway. What about you? I come every now and then. My boyfriend didn't like these movies, but we just broke up, so I plan on coming from now on. I was trying to be casual, but failed. Oh, well, that's cool. Not that you guys broke up, just that you're able to come here often.

She laughed again. I tried to recover. So are you coming the week after next? They're supposed to show Day of the Dead. It's really cool. Yeah, I'll be here. She smiled, and I was about to suggest that maybe we could sit together when she quickly closed the space between us and hugged me.

It was really good to see you. She said with her arms around me. I was trying to think of what to say when I realized the biggest problem was that I had forgotten how to talk. Luckily, Ryan, who I could hear approaching me from the hallway, came in and spoke for me. Dude, you know the movie is over, right? Let's get the fuck out of... Oh, yeah.

Veronica let go and said that she'd see me next time. She was played out of the room by porn music Ryan was making with his mouth. I was furious, but it didn't. I participated as soon as I heard Veronica laughing in the lobby. Day of the Dead couldn't come soon enough. Ryan's family was going out of town, so he wouldn't be able to drive us, and the other friends I was with that night didn't have cars. A couple of days before the movie, I asked my mom if she could take me. She responded almost immediately, denying my request.

But I persisted, and she picked up on the desperation in my voice. She asked why I wanted to go so badly since I had seen the movie before. and I hesitated before saying that I was hoping to see a girl there. She smiled and asked playfully if she knew the girl, and I reluctantly told her it was Veronica. The smile disappeared from her face, and she coldly said. No. I decided that I would call Veronica to see if she could pick me up. I had no idea if she still lived at home, but it was worth a try.

But then I realized that Josh might answer. I hadn't talked to him in almost three years, and if he answered, I obviously couldn't ask to talk to his sister. I felt guilty for calling to speak with Veronica and not Josh, but I dismissed that feeling quickly. Josh hadn't called me in years either. I picked up the phone and dialed the number that was still embedded in my muscle memory from having dialed it so often those years ago. It rang several times before someone picked up.

It wasn't Josh. I felt a mixture of both relief and disappointment. I realized in that second that I really missed Josh. I would call after this weekend and talk to him, but this was my own. chance to see if Ronica could or would take me, so I asked for her. The person told me I had dialed the wrong number. I repeated the number back to her, and she confirmed. She said that they must have changed their number, and I agreed.

I apologized for the disturbance and hung up. I was suddenly intensely sad because now I couldn't contact Josh even if I wanted to. I felt terrible for having been afraid that he might answer the phone. He had been my very best friend. I realized that the only way I could be put back in touch with him was through Veronica, so now, not that I needed one, I had another reason to see her. I told my mom the day before the movie that I was no longer concerned with going, but was hoping she could drop me off at my friend Chris's house.

She relented and dropped me off that Saturday a couple of hours before the movie. My plan was to walk from his house to the theater since he only lived about a half mile away. They went to church early on Sundays, so his parents would go to sleep early Saturday night, and Chris was fine with not coming with me, since he planned on chatting with his girl he met online. He said that the walk back to his house would be even lonelier after she laughed in my face when I tried to kiss her, and I told him not to electrocute himself when he tried to have sex with his computer. I left his house at 11.15. I tried to pace myself, so I'd get there just before the movie. I was going by myself, and so I didn't want to just hang around there waiting.

On the way to the theater, I figured that if Veronica showed up at all, it would be lucky for us to arrive at the same time. So I debated whether I should wait outside or just go in. Both had their pros and cons. As I was grappling with these concerns, I noticed that the steady stream of streaking car lights that had been overtaking me had been replaced by a single, constant spotlight that refused to pass. The road wasn't illuminated by streetlights, so I was walking in the grass with the road about 20 feet to my left. I stepped a little more to my right and craned my neck over my left shoulder to see what was behind me.

A car had stopped about 10 feet behind me. All I could see were the violently bright headlights that were cutting through the otherwise Stygian surroundings. I thought that it might be one of Chris's parents. Maybe they had come to check in on us and seen that I was gone. It wouldn't have taken much pressing for Chris to confess. I took one step toward the car, and it broke its pause and started driving toward me at a slow pace. It passed me, and I saw that it wasn't Chris's parents, or any car that I recognized for that matter.

I tried to see the driver, but it was too dark, and my pupils had shrunk when faced with the blinding lights from the car just moments before. They adjusted enough so that I could see a tremendous crack in the back window of the car as it drove away. I didn't think much of the whole affair. Some people find it fun to scare other people. I'd often hide around corners and jump out at my mom after all. I timed it right and got there about ten minutes before the movie. I had decided to wait outside until around 1157, since that would give me time to find her inside if she was already seated.

As I was considering the possibility that she might not show, I saw her. She was alone, and she was beautiful. I waved to her and walked to close the dinner. distance. She smiled and asked if my friends were already inside. I said that they weren't and realized that this must seem like I was trying to make this a date. She didn't seem bothered by that, nor was she bothered when I handed her the ticket I'd already bought.

She looked at me quizzically, and I said, Don't worry, I'm rich. She laughed and we went inside. I bought us one popcorn and two drinks and spent most of the movie debating whether or not I should time reaching my hand into the popcorn bag when she reached in so that they would touch. She seemed to enjoy the movie, and before I knew it, it was over. We didn't linger in the theater, and because this was a midnight show, we couldn't loiter in the lobby, so we walked outside. The parking lot of the theater was big, because it was connected with a mall that had

gone out of business. Not wanting the night to be over just yet, I continued the conversation while casually walking toward the old mall. As we were about to round the corner and leave the theater out of sight, I looked back and saw that her car wasn't the only one left in the parking lot. The other one had a large crack in the back window. My immediate uneasiness turned to understanding. That makes a lot of sense. The driver of that car works here and must have figured I was on my way to the movie. Injecting real horror into the life of a horror fan seemed like an obvious move. We walked around the mall and talked about the movie. I told her that I thought Day of the Dead was better than Dawn of the Dead, but she refused to agree.

I told her of when I called her old number and about the dilemma about who would answer the phone. She didn't find it as funny as I now did, but she took my phone and put her number in it. She commented that it might be the worst cell phone she's ever seen. Her evaluation wasn't rescinded when I told her I couldn't even receive pictures on it. I called her so she'd have my number and she programmed it in. She told me that she was graduating, but she hadn't done well in school school. so far that year, so she wasn't sure if she'd even get into college. I told her to attach a picture of herself to the application, and they'd pay for her to go

there just so they could look at her. She didn't laugh at that one, and I thought she might be offended. She might have thought I was replying that she couldn't get in based on her intelligence. I nervously glanced at her, and she was just smiling. Even in this poor light, I could see that she was blushing. I wanted to hold her hand, but I didn't. As we walked down the final side of the mall, I was just. back toward the theater, I asked her about Josh. She told me she didn't want to talk about it.

I asked her if he was at least doing all right, and she just said, I don't know. I figured Josh must have taken a wrong turn somewhere and started getting into trouble. I felt bad. I felt guilty. As we approached the parking lot, I noticed that the car with the cracked window was gone, and that her car was now the only one in the parking lot. She asked me if I needed a ride and even though I really didn't I said I'd appreciate it I had drunk my whole soda during the movie and all that walking was putting pressure on my bladder I knew that I couldn't wait until I was back at Chris's but I had decided that I was going to try to kiss her when she dropped me off and I didn't want this biological

nagging to rush me out of the car this would be my first kiss I could think of no ruse to conceal what I needed to do the theater had long closed so I only had one option I told her that I was going to go behind the theater and piss, but that I'd be back in two shakes. It was obvious that I thought it was hilarious, and she seemed to laugh more at how funny I found it than at how funny it clearly was. On the way towards the theater, I stopped and turned toward her. I asked her if Josh had ever told her that kid named Alex had done something nice for me. She paused to think about it for a moment, and she said that he had. She inquired as to why I had asked, but I said it was nothing.

Josh was a really good friend. When I went to go behind the theater, I realized that there was a chain-link fence extending off and running parallel to the walls of the building. Where I stood, she could still see me, and the fence seemed to stretch on endlessly. So I thought I'd just hop it, duck out of sight, and then return as quickly as I could. It may have been too much of an effort, but I thought it polite. I climbed the fence and walked just a little waves until I was out of sight and urinated. For a moment, the only sounds were the crickets in the grass behind me.

These sounds were overpowered by a noise that I can still hear when it's quiet, and there are no other noises to distract my ears. In the distance, I heard a faint screeching, which quickly subsided, only to be replaced with a cascade of thundering vibration. I realized quickly enough what it was. It was a car. The growling of the engine got louder, and then I thought, no, not louder, closer. As soon as I realized this, I started back toward the fence, but before I could get very far

at all, I heard a brief, truncated scream, and the roar of an engine terminated in a deafening thud. I started running, but after only two or three steps, I was tripped by a loose piece of stone and fell hard and fast on the concrete. My head striking the corner of a chair as I fell. I was dazed for maybe 30 seconds, but the renewed rumbling of the engine drew my senses back and my equilibrium was restored by adrenaline. I redoubled my efforts. I was worried that whoever had crashed the car might harass Ronica.

As I was climbing over the fence, I saw that there was still only one car in the parking lot. I didn't see any evidence of a crash. I thought that I might have misjudged its direction or proximity. As I ran towards Veronica's car, and as my orientation changed, I saw what the car had hit. My legs stopped working almost immediately. It was Veronica. Her car was sitting between us, and as I closed the distance and walked around it, she came fully into view.

Her body was twisted and crumpled like a discarded figure meant to represent a catalog of things the human body cannot do. I could see the bone of her right shin cutting through her jeans, and her left arm was wrapped so hard around the back of her neck that her hand fell on her right breast. Her head was craned back, and her mouth hung widely open toward the sky. There was so much blood. As I looked at her, I actually found it hard to discern whether she was laying on her back or on her stomach. And this optical illusion made me feel sick.

When you were confronted with something in the world that simply doesn't belong, your mind tries to convince itself that it is dreaming. And to that end, it provides you with that distant sense of all things moving slowly, as if through sap. In that moment, I honestly felt that I would wake up any minute. But I didn't wake up. I fumbled with my phone to call for help, but I had no signal. I could see Veronica's phone sticking out of what I thought was her front pocket. I had no choice. Trembling, I reached for the phone, and as I slid it out, she moved and grasped her air

so violently that it seemed as if she were trying to breathe in the whole world. This startled me so much that I staggered back and fell onto the asphalt with her phone in my hand. She was trying to adjust her body to get into its natural position, but with the same, she was With every spasm and jerk, I could hear the cracking and grinding of her bones. Without thinking, I scrambled over to her and put my face over hers and just said, Veronica, don't move, don't move, okay? Just stay still.

Don't move. Veronica, please, please, just don't move. I kept saying it, but the words started to fall apart as tears came streaming down my face. I opened her phone and it still worked. It was still on the screen where she had saved my number, and when I saw that, I felt I felt my heart break a little. I called 911 and waited with her, telling her that she would be okay. I felt guilty for lying to her every time I said it.

When the sound of sirens tore through the air, she seemed to become more alert. She had remained conscious since I found her, but now more of the light was coming back into her eyes. Her brain was still protecting her from pain, though it looked as if it was finally allowing her to become aware that something was terribly wrong with her. Her eyes rolled over to mine and her lips moved. She was struggling, but I heard her. I picture.

My picture. He took it. I didn't understand what she meant, so I said the only thing I could. I'm so sorry, Veronica. I rode with her in the ambulance where she finally lost consciousness. I waited in the room that they had reserved for her. I still had her phone, so I put it in her purse, and I called my mom. from the hospital. It was about 4 a.m. I told her I was fine, but that Veronica was not. She

cursed at me and said she'd be right there, but I told her I wasn't leaving until Veronica was out of surgery. She said she'd come anyway. My mom and I didn't speak that much. I told her I was sorry for lying, and she said that we'd talk about it later. I think had we talked more in that room, if I had just told her about boxes or the night with the raft, if she had just She just told me more of what she knew. I think that things would have changed. But we sat there in silence. She told me that she loved me and that I could call her whenever I wanted her to come get me.

As my mom was leaving, Veronica's parents rushed in. Her dad and my mom exchanged a few words that appeared to be quite serious while Veronica's mother talked to the person at the desk. Her mother was a nurse, but didn't work at this hospital. I'm sure that she had tried to get Veronica transferred, but her condition. was prohibitive. While we waited, the police came in and talked to each of us. I told them what happened, they made some notes, and then they left. She came out of surgery, and 90% of her body was covered in a thick, white cast.

Her right arm was free, but the rest of her was bound like a raccoon. She was still under, but I remembered how I felt when I had my cast before kindergarten. I asked a nurse for a marker, but I couldn't think of anything to write. I slept in a chair in the corner and went home the next day. I came back every afternoon for several days. At some point, they had moved another patient into her room and set up a screen around Veronica's bed to act as a partition. She didn't seem to be feeling better, but she made more comments of lucidity. But even during these periods, we wouldn't really talk.

Her jaw had been broken by the car, so the doctors had wired it shut. I sat with her for a while, but there was nothing more I could say. I got up and walked over to her. I kissed her on the forehead, and she whispered through her clenched teeth. Josh. This surprised me a little, but I looked at her and said, Has he not come to see you? No.

I found myself really irritated. Even if Josh had been getting into trouble, he should still come see his sister. I thought. I was about to express this when she said. Josh, he ran away. I should have told you. I felt my blood turned to ice. When?

When did this happen? When he was 13? Did he leave a note or something? On his pillow. She started crying and I followed her. But I think now we were crying for different reasons, even if I didn't realize it. At this point, there were a lot of things I still didn't remember about my childhood, and there were a lot of connections I hadn't yet made.

I told her I had to go, but that she could text me any time. I got a text from her the next day, telling me not to come back. I asked why, and she said she didn't want me to see her like that again. I agreed, begrudgingly. We texted each other every day, though. I kept this from my mom because I knew that she didn't like me talking to Veronica. Usually her texts were fairly short, and mostly only in response to more lengthy texts that I would send her. I tried calling her only once.

I was sure she was screening her calls, but I hoped I could hear her voice. She picked up but didn't say anything. I could hear how labored her breathing was. About a week after she told me not to come see her anymore, she sent me a text that simply read, I love you. I was filled with so many different emotions, but I responded by expressing the most prevalent one. I replied, I love you too. She said that she wanted to be with me and that she couldn't wait until she could see me again.

She told me that she had been released and was convalescing at her house. These exchanges carried on for several weeks, but every time I asked to come see her, she would say, soon. I kept insisting, and the following week she said that she thought she might be able to make it to the next midnight movie. I couldn't believe it, but she insisted that she would try. I got a text from her the afternoon of the movie, saying, See you tonight. I got Ryan to drive me, since Chris's parents had found out what had happened and said I wasn't welcome at their house anymore. I explained to Ryan that she might be in bad shape, but that I really cared about her, so to give us some space.

He accepted that, and we headed down there. Veronica didn't show. I had saved a seat for her right next to me near the exit, so she could get in and out easily. But ten minutes into the movie, a man slid into the chair, and I whispered, I, excuse me, this seat is taken. But he didn't respond at all. He just stared ahead at the screen. I remember wanting to move because there was something wrong with the way he was breathing.

I fortified because I realized that she wasn't coming. I texted her the next day, asking if she was all right, and I inquired as to why she didn't show the previous night. She responded with what turned out to be the last message I'd received from her. She simply said, see you again soon. She was delirious, and I was worried about her. I sent her several replies reminding her about the movie and saying that it was no big deal, but she just stopped replying. I grew increasingly upset over the next several days.

I couldn't reach her at home because I didn't know that number, and I wasn't even sure where they lived. My mood became increasingly depressed, and my mother, who had been really nice as of late, asked me if I was okay. I told her that I hadn't heard from Veronica in days, and I felt all the warmth leave her disposition. What do you mean? She was supposed to meet me at the movies yesterday. I know it's only been three weeks since she got hit, but she said she'd try to come. And after that, she'd just stop talking to me altogether. She must hate me. She looked confused, and I could read on her face she was trying to tell if my mind had simply broken. When she saw that I hadn't, her eyes began to water, and she pulled me towards her, embracing her.

She was beginning to saw, but it seemed too intense a reaction to my problem. I had no reason to think that she particularly cared for Veronica. She drew in a shuddering breath and then said something that still makes me nauseous even now. Veronica's dead, sweetheart. Oh, God, I thought you knew. She died on the last day you visited her. Oh, baby, she died weeks ago. She had completely broken down, but I knew it wasn't because of Veronica.

I broke the embrace and staggered backwards. My mind was swimming. It wasn't possible. I had just exchanged messages with her yesterday. I could only think to ask one question, and it was probably the most trivial I could ask. Then why was her phone still on? She continued sobbing. She didn't answer.

I exploded. Why did it take them so long to shut off her goddamn phone? Her crying broke enough to mutter. The pictures. I would come to find out that her parents thought that her phone had just been lost in the accident, the fact that I had put it in her purse the night she was brought to the hospital. When they retrieved her belongings, the phone was not among them. They intended to contact the phone company at the end of the billing cycle to deactivate

the line, but they received a call informing them of massive and pending charges for hundreds of pictures that had been sent from her phone, pictures that were all sent to my phone, pictures that I had never got because my phone couldn't receive them. They learned that they were all sent after the night she died. They deactivated the phone immediately. I tried not to think about the contents of those pictures, but I remember wondering for some reason whether I would have been in any of them. My mouth went dry, and I felt the painful sting of despair as I thought of the last message I received from her phone. See you again soon.

On the first day of kindergarten, my mother had elected to drive me to school. We were both nervous, and she wanted to be there with me all the way up to the moment I walked into class. It took me a bit longer to get ready in the morning due to my still mending arm. The cast came up a couple of inches past my elbow, which meant that I had to cover the entire arm with a specially designed latex bag when I showered. The bag was built to pull tight around the opening in order to seal out any water that might otherwise destroy the cast. I'd gotten really adept at clinching the bag myself. That morning, however, perhaps due to my excitement or nervousness, I hadn't pulled the strap tight enough and half-war. way through the shower, I could feel water pooling inside the bag around my fingers. I jumped

out and tore the latex shield away, but I could feel that the previously rigid plaster had become soft after absorbing the water. Because there is no way to effectively clean the area between your body and a cast, the dead skin that would normally have fallen away merely sits there. When stirred by moisture like sweat, it emits an odor. And apparently, this odor is proportionate to the amount of moisture introduced. Because soon after I began attempting to dry it, I was struck by the powerful stench of rot. As I continued to frantically rub it with the towel, it began to disintegrate. I was growing increasingly distressed. I had put as much effort as a child could into his first day of school. I had sat with my mom picking out my clothes the night before.

I had spent a great deal of time picking out my backpack, and I had become exceedingly excited to show everyone my lunchbox that had the Ninja Turtles on it. I had fallen into my mom's habit of calling these children I hadn't met yet, my friends already. But as the condition of my cast worsened, I became deeply upset at the thought that surely I wouldn't be able to apply that label to anyone by the time the day was over. Defeated, I showed my mom. It took 30 minutes to get most of the moisture out while working to preserve the rest of the cast. To address the problem of the smell, my mom cut slivers off of the last.

bar of soap and slid them down into the cast, and then rubbed the remainder of the soap on the outside in an attempt to cocoon the rancid smell inside a more pleasant one. By the time we arrived at school, my classmates were already engaged in their second activity, and I was shoehorned into one of the groups. I wasn't made very clear on what the guidelines of the activity were, and within about five minutes I had violated the rules so badly that each member of the group complained to the teacher and asked why I had to be in their group. I had brought a marker to school in hopes that I could collect some signatures or drawings on my cast next to my mothers.

And I suddenly felt very foolish for having even put the marker in my pocket that morning. The kindergartners had the lunchroom to themselves at the elementary school, but some of the tables were off limits, so I didn't have to sit alone. I was self-consciously picking at the fraying ends of my cast when a kid sat across from me. I like your lunchbox. I could tell he was making fun of me, and I grew really angry. In my mind, that lunchbox was the last good thing about my day. I didn't look up from my arm, and I felt a burning in my eyes from the tears that I was holding back.

I looked up to tell the kid to leave me alone, but before I could get the words out, I saw something that made me pause. He had the exact same lunchbox. I laughed. I like your lunchbox, too. I think Michelangelo's the coolest. He said while miming Nunchuk moves. I was in the middle of rebutting by saying that Raffirmy,

Rayel was my favorite, when he knocked his open carton of milk on the table and onto his lap. I tried very hard to stifle my laughter since I didn't know him at all, but the struggling look on my face must have struck him as funny because he started laughing first. Suddenly I didn't feel so bad about my cast, and thought that this person would hardly notice now. Just then, I thought to try my luck. Hey, do you want to sign my cast? As I pulled out the marker, he asked me how I broke it.

I told him that I fell out of the tallest tree in the neighborhood. He seemed impressed. I watched him laboriously draw his name, and when he was done, I asked him what it said. He told me it said. Josh. Josh and I had lunch together every day, and whenever we could, we partnered up for projects. I helped him with his handwriting, and he took the blame when I wrote, Fart on the Wall and Permanent Marker.

I would come to know other kids, but I think I knew even then that Josh was my only real friend. Moving a friendship outside of school when you're five years old is actually more difficult than most remember. The day we launched our balloons, we had such a good time that I asked Josh if he wanted to come to my house the next day to play. He said that he did and that he'd bring some of his toys. I said that we could go exploring and maybe swim in the lake. When I got home, I asked my mom and she said it would be fine.

My enthusiasm was boundless until I realized I had no way of contacting Josh to tell him. I spent the whole weekend worrying that our friendship was. would be dissolved by Monday. When I saw him after the weekend, I was relieved to find that he had run into the same obstacle and thought it was funny. Later that week, we both remembered to write down our phone numbers at home and then exchange them at school. My mom spoke with Josh's dad, and it was decided that my mom would pick up Josh and myself

from school that Friday. We alternated this basic structure nearly every weekend. The fact that we lived so close made things much easier on our parents, who seemed to work constantly. My mom and I had moved across the city at the end of first grade, and I was sure that our friendship had seen its last days. As we drove away from the house I had lived in my whole life, I felt a sadness that I knew wasn't just about a house. I was saying goodbye to my friend forever, but Josh and I, to my surprise and delight, stayed close. Despite the fact that we spent a majority of our time apart and only saw one another on weekends, we remained remarkably similar

as we grew. Our personalities coalesced. Our senses of humor complimented each other's, and we would often find that we started liking new things independently. We even sounded alike that when I stayed with Josh, he would sometimes call my mom pretending to be me. His success rate was impressive. My mom would sometimes joke that the only way she could tell us apart was by our hair. He had straight, dirty, blonde hair like his sister, while I had curly, dark brown hair like my mother. One would think that the most likely thing to drive two young friends apart would be what's out of our control. However, I think the catalyst of our gradual disengagement was my insistence that we sneak out of my old house to look for boxes.

The next weekend, I invited Josh over to my house, in keeping with our tradition of alternating houses, but he said that he wasn't really feeling up to it. We started seeing progressively less and less of one another over the next year or so. It had gone from once a week to once a month to once every couple of months. For my 12th birthday, my mom threw a party for me. I hadn't made that many friends since we moved, so it wasn't a surprise party since my mom had no idea who to invite. I told the handful of kids I'd become acquainted with and called Josh to see if he wanted

to come. Originally, he said that he didn't think he could make it, but the day before the party, he called to say he'd be there. I was really excited because I hadn't seen him in several months. The party went pretty well. My biggest concern was that Josh and the other kids wouldn't get a lot. long, but they seemed to like each other well enough. Josh was surprisingly quiet.

He hadn't brought me a gift and apologized for that. I told him it wasn't a big deal. I was just glad that he was able to make it. I tried to start several conversations with him, but they seemed to keep reaching dead ends. I asked him what was wrong. I told him that I didn't get why things had become so awkward between us. They were never like that before. We used to hang out almost every weekend and talk on the phone every couple of

of days. I asked him what happened to us. He looked up from staring at his shoes and just said, You left. Just after he said that, my mom yelled in from the other room that it was time to open presents. I forced a smile and walked into the dining room as they sang Happy Birthday. There were a couple of wrapped boxes and a lot of cards, since most of my extended family lived out of state. Most of the gifts were silly and forgettable, but I remember that Brian gave me a mighty Max toy shaped like a snake that I was. I kept for years afterwards. My mom insisted that I opened all the cards that had been brought and thanked each person

who had given one. Because several years before on Christmas, I had torn through the wrapping paper and envelopes with such fervor that I had destroyed any possibility of discerning who had sent which gift or what amount of money. We separated the ones that had been sent by mail and the ones that had been brought that day, so my friends wouldn't have to sit through me opening cards from people they had never met. Most of the cards from my friends had a couple of dollars in them, and the ones from my family members contained larger bills. One envelope didn't have a name written on it, but it was in the

pile, so I opened it. The card had a generic floral pattern on its face, and seemed to be a card that had been received by someone else, who was now recycling it for my birthday, because it was actually a little dingy. I actually appreciated the idea that it was a reused card, since I'd always thought the cards were silly. I angled it so that the money wouldn't fall out on the floor when I opened it, but the only thing inside was a message that had come printed in the card. I love you. Whoever had given me this card hadn't written anything in it, but they had circled

the message and pencil a couple of times. I chuckled a little and said, Echee, thanks for the awesome card, Mom. She looked at me quizzically and then turned her attention to the card. She told me it wasn't from her and seemed amused as she showed my friends. Looking at their faces, trying to discern who had played the joke, none of the kids stepped forward, so my mom said, Don't worry, sweetheart.

At least you know now that two people love you. She followed with an extremely prolonged and excruciating kiss on my forehead that transformed the group's bewilderment into hysteria. They were all laughing, so it could have been any of them, but Mike seemed to be laughing the hardest. To become a participant rather than a subject of the gag, I said that him that just because he had given me the card, that he shouldn't think that I'd kiss him later.

We all laughed, and as I looked at Josh, I saw that he was finally smiling. Well, I think that gift might be a winner, but you have a couple more to open. My mom slid another present in front of me. I was still feeling tremors of suppressed chuckles in my abdomen as I tore the colorful paper away. When I saw the gift, I had no need to suppress the laughter anymore. My smile dropped as I looked at what I'd been given. It was a pair of walkie-talkies. Well, go on.

Show everyone. I held them up, and everyone seemed to approve, but as I drew my attention to Josh, I could see that he had turned a sickly shade of white. We locked eyes for a moment, and then he turned and walked into the kitchen. As I watched him dial a number on the corded phone attached to the wall, my mom whispered in my ear that she knew that Josh didn't like to talk as much since one of the walkie-talkies had broken, so she thought I'd like it. I was filled with an intense appreciation for my mom's thoughtfulness, but the feeling was easily overpowered by the emotions resurrected by the returning memories I tried so hard to bury. When everyone was eating cake, I asked Josh who he had called. He told me he wasn't feeling well, so he called his dad to come get him.

I understood that he wanted to leave, but I told him that I wished we could hang out more. I extended one of the walkie-talkies, but he put his hand out in refusal. Dejected, I said, said. Well, thanks for coming, I guess. I hope I'll see you before my next birthday. I'm sorry. I'll try to call you back more often. I really will. He said. The conversation stagnated as we waited by the door for his dad. I looked at his face. Josh seemed genuinely remorseful that he hadn't made more of an effort. His mood seemed suddenly bolstered by an idea that had struck him. He told me that he knew what he'd get me for my birthday.

It would take a while, but he thought that I would really like it. I told him it wasn't a big deal, but he insisted. He seemed in better spirits and apologized for being such a drag at my party. He said that he was tired, that he hadn't been sleeping well. I asked him why that was as he opened the door in response to his dad's honking in the driveway. He turned back toward me and waved goodbye as he answered my question. I think I've been sleepwalking. That was the last time I saw my friend.

and a couple of months later, he was gone. Over the past several weeks, the relationship between my mother and I has grown increasingly strained due to my attempts to learn the details of my childhood. It's often the case that one cannot know the breaking point of a thing until that thing fractures, and after the last conversation with my mother, I imagine that we will spend the rest of our lives attempting to repair what had taken a lifetime to build. She had put so much energy into keeping me safe, both physically and psychically. psychologically, but I think the walls meant to insulate me from harm were also protecting

her emotional stability. As the truth came pouring out the last time we spoke, I could hear a trembling in her voice that I think was a reverberation of the collapse of her world. I don't imagine my mother and I will talk much anymore, and while there are still some things I don't understand, I think I know enough. After Josh disappeared, his parents had done all they could to try and find him. From the very first day, the police had suggested that they contact all of Josh's friends' parents to see if he was with them. They did this, of course, but no one had seen him or had any idea where he might be.

The police had been unable to turn over any new information about Josh's whereabouts, despite the fact that they had received several anonymous phone calls from a woman, urging them to compare this case with the stalking case that had been opened up six years before. If Josh's mother's grip on the world loosened when her son vanished, it broke when Vanessa died. She had seen many people die at the hospital, but there was no amount of desensitization that can fortify a person against a death of their child.

She would visit Veronica twice a day, since she was recuperating at a different hospital, once before her shift and once after. On the day Veronica died, her mother was late leaving work, and by the time she arrived at her daughter's hospital, Veronica had already passed away. This was too much for her,

and over the next couple of weeks, she became increasingly more unstable. She would often wander outside, yelling for both Josh and Veronica to come home, and there were several times her husband found her wandering around my old neighborhood in the middle of the night, half-clothed and frantically searching for her son and daughter. Due to his wife's mental deterioration, Josh's dad could no longer travel for work and began taking construction jobs that were less well-paying, so he could be closer to home. When they finally began expanding my old neighborhood more, about three months after Veronica died,

Josh's dad applied for every position and was hired. He was qualified to lead the building sites, but he took a job as a laborer, helping to build frames and clean up sites and whatever else was needed. He even took odd jobs that would occasionally come up, mowing lawns, repairing fences, anything to keep from traveling. They began clearing the woods in the area next to the tributary to transform the land into an property. Josh's dad was tasked with the responsibility of leveling the recently deforested lot, and his job guaranteed him at least several weeks of work. On the third day, he arrived at a

spot he could not level. Each time he drived over, it would remain lower than the surrounding land. Frustrated, he got the machine to survey the area. He was tempted to simply pack more dirt into the depression, but he knew that would only be an aesthetic and a temporary solution. He had worked construction for years and knew that the root systems from large trees that had recently been cut down would often decompose, leaving weakness in the soil that would manifest as weakness in the foundation above. He weighed his options and elected to dig a little bit with a shovel in case the problem was shallow enough to fix without needing a machine that would have to be brought over from another site.

As my mother described where this was, I knew I had been at that spot before the soil was broken and before it had been filled in. I felt a tightening in my chest. He dug a small hole about three feet down until his shovel collided with something hard. He smashed his shovel against it repeatedly in an attempt to gauge the thickness of the root and the density of the network when suddenly his shovel plunged through the resistance. Confused, he dug the hole wider. About a half hour of excavating, he found himself standing on a brown blanket-covered box about six feet long and four feet wide.

Our minds work to avoid dissonance. If we hold a belief strongly enough, our minds will forcefully reject conflicting evidence so that we can maintain the integrity of our understanding of the world. Up until the very moment, despite what all sense would have indicated, despite the fact that some small suffocated part of him understood what was supporting his weight, this man believed he knew his son was alive. My mom received a call at 6 p.m. She knew who it was, but she couldn't understand what he was saying.

But what she did comprehend made her leave immediately. When she arrived, she found Josh's dad sitting perfectly still with his back to the hole. He was holding the shovel so tightly it seemed it might snap, and he was staring straight ahead with eyes that looked as lifeless as his sharks. He wouldn't respond to any of her words and only reacted when she tried gently to take the shovel from him. He dragged his eyes slowly to hers and just said, I don't understand. He repeated this as if he had forgotten all other words, and my mother could hear him still muttering as she walked past him to look into the hole.

She told me she wished she had gouged her eyes out before she faced downward into that crater, and I told her that I knew what she was about to say, and that she need not continue, and it was expressing a look of such intense despair that it caused my stomach to turn. I realized that she had known of this for almost ten years, and was supposed to be. hoping that she'd never have to tell me. As a result, she never came up with the proper arrangement of words to describe what she saw. And as I sit here, I met with the same difficulty of articulation. Josh was dead. His face was sunken in and contorted in such a way that it was as if the misery and hopelessness of all the world had been transferred into it. The assaulting smell of decay rose

from the crypt, and my mother had to close her eyes and mouth to keep from vomiting. His skin was cracked, almost crocodileian, and a stream of blood that had followed these lines had dried on his face after pooling and staining the wood around his head. His eyes lay half-lidded, facing straight up. She said by the look of him, he had not been long dead, and thus time had not brought the mercy of degradation to erase the pain and terror that was now etched into his face. She said it was as if he had fixed his gaze right on her, his open mouth offering an all-too-late plea for help. The rest of his body, however, wasn't visible. Someone else was covering it.

He was large and lay face down on top of Josh, and as my mother's mind stretched itself to take in what her eyes were attempting to tell her, she became aware of the significance of the way in which he laid. He was holding Josh. Their legs lay frozen by death, but entangled like vines in some lush tropical forest. One arm rested under Josh's neck, only to wrap around his body so that they may closer still. As the sun passed through the trees, its light became reflected by something pinned

at Josh's shirt. My mother stooped to one knee and raised the collar of her shirt over her nose so that she might block out the smell. When she saw what had caught the sun, her legs abandoned her, and she nearly fell into the tomb. It was a picture. It was a picture of me as a child. She staggered backwards, gasping and trembling and colliding with Josh's father, who still sat facing away from the hole.

She understood why he had called her, but she could not bring herself to tell him what she had kept from everyone else for all these years. Josh's family never knew about the night I had woken up in the woods. She knew now that she should have told them, but to tell them now would help nothing. As she sat there, resting her back against Josh's dad, he spoke. I can't tell my wife. I can't tell her that our little boy. His speech staggered in fits as he pressed his wet face into his dirt-caped hands.

She couldn't bear it. After a moment, he stood up, still shuddering and lumbering toward the grave. With a final sob, he stepped down into the coffin. Josh's dad was a big guy, but not as big as the man in the box. He grabbed the back of the man's collar and pulled hard. It was as if he intended to throw the man out of the grave in a singular motion, but the collar ripped and the body fell back down on top of his son. You motherfucker!

He grabbed the man by the shoulders and heaved him back up until he was off of Josh and sat awkwardly upright against the wall of the grave. He looked at the man and staggered back a step. Oh, God, no, no, no, please God, please God, no! In a struggling but powerful movement, he lifted and pushed the corpse completely off of the ground, and they both heard the sound of glass rolling against wood. It was a bottle. He handed it to my mother. It was ether.

Josh! My boy. My baby boy. Why is there so much blood? What did he do to you? As my mother looked at the man who now lay facing upward, she realized she was facing the person who had haunted our lives for over a decade. She had imagined him so many times, always evil and always terrifying.

and the cries of Josh's father seemed to confirm her worst fears. But as she stared at his face, she thought that this didn't look like who she imagined. This was just a man. As she looked at his frozen expression, it actually looked serene. The corners of his lips were turned up slightly. She saw that he was smiling. Not the expected smile of a maniac from a film or horror story. Not the smile of a demon or the smile of a fiend.

This was a smile of content. repentance or satisfaction. It was a smile of bliss. It was a smile of love. As she looked down from his face, she saw a tremendous wound on his neck from where the skin had been ripped out. She was at first relieved when she realized that the blood had not been josh's. Perhaps he had suffered less. But this comfort was short-lived as she realized just how wrong she was.

She brought a hand up to her mouth and whispered, almost as if she was afraid to remind the world what had happened. He were alive. Josh must have bitten the man's neck in an attempt to get free, and although the man had died, Josh couldn't move him. I began crying when I thought of how long he must have laid there. She looked through the man's pockets for some kind of identification, but she only found a piece of paper. On it was a drawing of a man holding hands with a small boy, and next to the boy were initials, my initials. I'd like to think that she was remembering that part of the story inaccurately. But I'll never know for sure.

As Josh's father carried his son out of the grave, my mom slid the piece of paper into her pocket. He kept muttering that his son's hair had been dyed. She saw that it had. It was now dark brown, and she noticed that he was dressed oddly. His clothes were all far too small. After Josh's dad delicately laid his boy on the soft dirt, he began gently pressing his hands against his son's pants to feel his pockets.

He heard a crinkle. carefully he retrieved a folded piece of paper from Josh's pockets. He looked at it but was vexed. Absently, he handed it to my mother, but she didn't recognize it either. I asked her what it was. She said it was a map, and I felt my heart shatter. He was finishing the map. That must have been his idea for my birthday present.

I found myself strangely hoping that he hadn't been taken while expanding it, as if that would somehow matter now. She heard Josh's father grunt and looked to see him pushing the man's body back into the ground. As he walked back toward the machine that had found this spot for him, he put his hand on a canister of gasoline and paused with his back toward my mother. You should go. I'm so sorry. It's not your fault.

I did this. Can't think like that. It was nothing. He interjected flatly, almost with no emotion at all. About a month ago, a guy approached me. as I was cleaning up the site on the new development to block over. He asked me if I wanted to make some extra money, and because my wife's not working right now, I accept it.

He told me that some kids had dug a bunch of holes on his property, and he offered me $100 to fill them in. He said that he wanted to take some pictures for the insurance company first, but if I came back after 5 p.m. the next day, that would be fine. I thought this guy was a sucker, since I knew clearing that lot was coming up, so someone would have had to do it anyway. But I needed the money, so I agreed. I didn't think he even had $100, but he put the bill in my hand, and I did the job the next day. I've been so exhausted that I didn't even think about it after it was done.

I didn't think about it until today when I pulled that same guy. off of my son. He pointed to the grave, and his emotion started to push through as he broke into sobs. He paid me a hundred dollars so that I would bury him with my boy! It was as if saying it aloud forced him to accept what had happened, and he collapsed onto the ground in tears. My mother could think of nothing to say and stood there in silence for what felt like a lifetime. She finally asked what to do about Josh.

His final resting place won't be here with him. This monster! As she looked back when she reached her car, she could see black smoke billowing and diffusing against the amber sky, and she hoped against all hope that Josh's parents would be okay. I left my mom's house without saying much else. I told her that I loved her and that I would talk to her soon, but I don't know what soon means for us. I got into my car and left.

I understood now why the events of my childhood had stopped years ago. As an adult, I saw connections that were lost as a child who tends to see the world in snapshots rather than a sequence. I thought about Josh. I loved him then, and I love him even still. I miss him more now that I know I'll never see him again, and I find myself wishing that I had hugged him the last time I saw him. I thought about Josh's parents, how much they had lost, and how quickly that loss had come.

They don't know about my connection to any of this, but I can never look them in the eyes now. I thought about Veronica. I had only really come to know her later in my life, but for those brief few weeks, I think that I really loved her. I think about my mother. She had tried so hard to protect me and was stronger than I would ever be. I tried not to think about the man and what he had done with Josh for more than two years. Mostly I just thought about Josh.

Sometimes I wish that he never sat across from me that day in kindergarten, that I'd never known what it was like to have a real friend. Sometimes I like to dream that he's in a better place, but that's only a dream. And I know that. The world is a cruel place, made crueler still by man. There would be no justice for my friend, no final confrontation, no vengeance. It had been over almost a decade for everyone but me now. I miss you, Josh. I'm sorry you chose me, me, but I'll always cherish the memories of you. We were explorers. We were adventurers. We were friends.