It was one of those preposterous summer nights when the sun forgot to set. We swarmed through the endless yellowed yards, a dirty dozen of us, defeating countless forbidding fences in pursuit of our prey. We cornered the twins by the Climbing Tree and fell upon them like stones; held one down, the other back, and put the former through the torture we’d learned from our elders on unforgiving blacktop playgrounds, just to see if the latter could feel it. He suffered, but not in the way we’d hoped, the magic way. So we set them free and scattered, shrill and sharp like shattered glass, as the countdown began. Hide and Seek. Ollie oxen free.
We heard the crack and the fading, twinned scream from amid the tall grass. We peered out from our hiding spots, saw the twins fall hand-in-hand through the rotted wooden cover of the abandoned well. We stood around the hole, silent as graves, dug a chunk of quartz from the ground, and dropped it into the darkness. We heard a groan from the deep. We remembered we had parents. Authorities were called.
They found one, but not the other. The one who came out never spoke again, never said his name—so we never knew which twin died, which one lived. Not that it mattered to us. One’s as good as the other. Two was too many. The one they didn’t find simply disappeared into the earth; we had our theories. All the way to China, we said. Or straight to Hell. The well is cordoned off but not closed. The adults want to keep looking. What for, we wonder.
He hides in the dark of his bedroom for eons. We lurk outside his window, calling for him to come out. We throw pebbles and pine cones. We lose our patience. Our calls lose their childlike lilt. They become jeers, taunts. We throw sticks and stones. His parents shriek at us; we laugh and stomp our feet in the dry, dismal dirt, raising a cloud of dust to cloak our escape.
At noon, he appears. We play Kill the Man With the Ball, and he clings to the periphery, avoids the scrum. He doesn’t want us to see his secret, but we do. Our eyes are young and keen. As the hour passes, the sun shifts. There’s no hiding it now. He picks his feet up and shakes them, but he can’t shake it off, the dark, dark thing being drawn across the field by the light. It’s stuck to him. We see the truth. On the ground, he casts his brother’s shadow rather than his own. Our imaginations run wild. So do we. We chase him home, him and the fiendish silhouette.
We don’t know what it means, this dark shade that’s stuck to him—all that’s left of his brother. We only know it’s wrong. We don’t know how it happened; we only know we need to send it back.
In the woods, we find a salamander with its belly sliced open, its damp little guts stuck to the face of a large, gray rock. It wriggles and writhes, dangling from its own intestinal tether. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a thing that happened. We still it with a large rock, putting it out of its misery. It’s part of our geography now: Salamander Rock, the Climbing Tree, Suicide Hill—our world of play.
At night, it’s Flashlight Tag. Our parents call, but we can’t hear them, not out here in the stifling heat, the fullness of the dark. There is no moon. We hold the lights to our chins and whisper outside his window: Come out and play. We rattle his screen with our fists till the metal thrums like thunder. Our beams strike the glass like lightning. He runs for the trees, and we dart among them for hours in pursuit.
In a narrow gap between two fallen tree trunks, we see a green, glowing face floating in the air. It looks like a mask with empty eyes, and a wide gaping mouth. It watches us, and though it says nothing, we hear it all the same. We wonder what it means. How it fits in, what’s the connection. But there isn’t one. It’s not part of this. It’s something else, something we’ll have to deal with later. First things first.
We pay no mind to bramble or thorn, tick or mosquito, though there are plenty. We find him mired in a swampy depression, dead leaves up to his knees. He’s blinded by our flashlights, paralyzed. Against a snag of oaks, we see his brother’s shadow rise tall behind him. With our beams, we twist it, bend it, tear it. We watch the shadow contort, ripped apart by our queasy yellow flashlights. It makes as if to howl, but it’s the living body that screams, the boy in front of us who feels the burn of our bulbs. He tears free from the mire and races deeper into the night.
We can’t see more than a few feet in front of us, but we hear it again, the same fading scream. We’re at the well again, looking down into the dark. We shine our beams inside, but they aren’t powerful enough to reach all the way to China, nor straight to Hell. We kick a hunk of granite over the lip; we don’t even hear it hit bottom. We go home. We go to bed. We dream of that awful, glowing face.
It’s good they kept looking, our parents say, after the authorities discover the body. What for, we wonder; to take it out of the ground only to put it back. They think it’s the one who never came out; we know it’s the one that did. The one they now think has run away. We don’t say anything. One’s as good as the other. Two was too many. We push our clean plates to the center of our tables. Our homework is all done. Our bellies are full. It’s time to play.
