Ritual

Time has an aimless way of drifting down here, two parts sugargum and sweetberry in the antebellum south. Today, when I arrive at our old cottage on the delta, you are not there to greet me and I am unsurprised, as always.

You used to crawl in the narrows for hide-and-go-seek, playing between warped floorboards and the sog of Mississippi silt. You’d wind your way around sunlight that stabbed through angled slits, your breath huffing in steady decline, a faint locomotive rounding a far bend and coming no closer.

A single strand of black hair lies naked beneath the table, curled around a blade of yellowed grass.

I crouch down, call your name. You do not answer.

The last time you heard my voice, you pressed yourself into the cool mud, spattered and unseen.

I used to play this game myself with my own father, so I was good at it.

I guessed where you were, not right away, but you were limbo flat and contorted beneath my feet, your voice the sullen mewl of a cornered cat when you knew I’d found you.

I pull back a floorboard, flip my flashlight on, peer down into the pitch black hole. A careless collection of grotesque angles lies half buried in the sludge. The smell pours out of the void, horrific and old, as old as I can remember.

I recoil and stagger back against the peeling blue wall, clasp my calloused hands over my mouth to steady the memory.

Whatever you were in life, what’s left now has spent some time alone.

Well, I say, your hiding place is still our secret. I knew you wouldn’t fit down there.

I knew it. I told you so.

I brush the dust off my jeans, close the door behind me, slog back home via mudded trail.

I can’t stop thinking.

I swear to God, child, if you had played it differently then, if you were a smarter boy, maybe you’d have crept so I couldn’t find you.