Our back pasture is an enclosed space surrounded by trees. There is a hill, but just a little one, that swoops down into the clearing. In the far left corner under a sweep of branches, there used to be an ice fishing house. It belonged to the family who lived here before mine, along with a truck cover that was riddled with bullet holes, an old lawn mower and a pile of garbage. My neighbor Joe and I used to pretend that the hill of trash was ancient, like it was left behind by the Aztecs or the Egyptians. The truth is that Joe and I had cut ourselves so often on rusted soup cans, old mason jars, broken china, and corroded car parts from that pile that we’d never admit we had played there.
Joe’s property was right beside mine and we used to climb to the highest hill –Joe would say in the whole county, but I knew it wasn’t true— and look over our miniature valley. We were a King and a Queen who ruled over it together, but not married, because that would be gross.
I don’t remember when, but the woods became our fortress very abruptly and we stopped playing at my house. Nobody shooed us or told us we couldn’t play at my house, but I think that even then we knew our fathers were dying; one of a disease he couldn’t cure, and the other of a heart so broken it couldn’t feel.
There are no more horses to eat the grass; it grows so high that I can’t see over it anymore. However, the horses were here before and the grass was beaten down, soft and green; we could run around barefoot and roll down the hills. Our domain stretched all over the pasture, but Joe and I never played in the ice fishing house. We had an unspoken agreement that something was wrong with that thing. Like the door was really a mouth and the windows bore some similar light to a pair of eyes. It wasn’t until we were growing apart and fatherless, a pair of pink-skinned newborns pretending to be fourteen, that we went back and tore it down with our bare hands. We shouldn’t have touched it, and we only understood it once we’d ripped it open and spilled its guts onto the grass.
The things we never talked about became true as we stood over our kill. We felt the truth gore us deeper than the slivers under our fingernails could ever reach. I was so cold in that moment that I knew we never should have gone inside. The whole earth felt abandoned beneath our feet as we floated above our feelings, and I knew it felt that way because I saw the trees and they mourned for us. We finally understood their sighs. We were just a boy and a girl with crowns made of paper; no gold, no silver, no shine at all. We had no kingdom. All there had ever been was a forest and a pair of children trying to escape a world that sustained evil things. There was nothing we could do except walk away. I question if there really was a time when the world consisted of glossy, chartreuse plants and sharp shards of glass that shone with thick, burgundy drops of blood. I know the pasture whispers of our dead kingdom as it grows wild over the ruins of the ice fishing house. I know that she remembers it all.
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