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Backyard
Here on the wrong side of the fence I’m listening for the jingle of her chain. Nothing. She’s gone for now—somewhere behind where the hanging mess of woods crumbles into the ruddy clearing, where the splattered muddozers sit aside the watery craters of basements-to-be—exploring the world of mud and wobbly planks and trees. Stumbling maybe in the holes beneath the weeds. All of this will belong to Fox Hollow. The houses will trap this place. Fences everywhere like boxes.
Snapping through the smooth bamboo we’ve used as machetes (to bushwhack the bamboo), the trees running blue branches through my hair, I think what I think every time I pierce through the net of twigs and leaves, into this world: there’s a thousand ticks—the kind with skulls for skin—bobbing on the leaves, bouncing in the summer dank; will this be the day they fall on me?
I call for her but hear only the birds, the screech of crickets, and, somewhere distant, my brother shouting her name through cupped hands. I can tell by his sound: he’s near where the heavy links of concrete pipe wait for the trench. He’s offering treats he doesn’t have in his pockets. He pokes the tip of his thumb through his fist, pretending it’s food. There’s desperation in his high-pitched shriek. "Bone!" His voice cracks again but today I won’t laugh.
Someone'd left the gate open—a crack—and she’s gone. Like that.
(it was my brother)
In the mornings, usually, the cranes and plows eat away at this place, rip holes in the ground that fill up with mud and sunken bridges and cups of coffee that float until it rains. In time those crumbly mounds of earth will flatten and hide beneath rolls of bright new grass. There’ll be a gleaming soccer ball. These woods will belong to the houses, but for now they are mine and my brother’s. They’re the backyard behind our backyard, the bigger one. She’s out there in this shaded place where a spider finds your arm before you find the spider; where everything pretends to be poison ivy; where you lose things and don’t rush to look for them; where we go too far and stay until the leaves are depressing with tomorrow, with school. We know each time we’ll never see her again, but then we find her—a jingle, then a pearly white jolt through the bramble. Once we found her disguised in the mud where the woods thin and dragged her home to whip her with hose water. And each other. Usually back here in the trees and the mud we find her. We know all the places to look.
Bill Carson's work has been nominated for the James Kirkwood Prize in Creative Writing at UCLA Extension writers’ program, and has been published at Avant Literary Magazine, a publication of Rowan University.
Email: Bill Carson
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