Time Disappears
1
Weaving between lumbering semis, I found my route to the mounds. Taking a sharp left, with manmade monstrosities surrounding, I found myself in another land. Dense forests abounded in every direction.

I could see nothing but green and brown. The signs pointed me to the right. As I ascended the hill, a slight breeze off the river stirred my senses. Remembrance of other native sites pierced my thoughts.
As I wandered through these forgotten hillocks, a grinding persisted in the distance. Aquatic vessels docked upon the river, unloading tremendous tonnage down the gullet of the city.

The last twilight of a bygone age lingers here, despite these nuisances. The earth feels their fleeting touch. The trees remember their embrace. Even the buzzing insects and chirping birds create a song out of lost memories.
2
Jack knew the power of this native land, while Ernest denied ancient magic’s hold upon us.
I watched them tumble from the crown of the Neolithic mound, down to the central field, once used for a similar violent sport. The two young men fought over a spherical stone, but with only one stick between them.

Upon the hilltop, they had each held a gory weapon, fresh from inopportune kills. Jack held a wooden baseball bat, splintered but deadly, while Ernest wielded a large round rock in both his hands.
Their tumble down the hill had left them bruised and unarmed. Entangled upon the ground, they fought on ferociously.
Breaking free of Ernest’s grasp, Jack sprang for the stone. Scooping it up, he feverishly rushed towards the thick woods. Ernest launched himself towards him in a desperate lunge, but found himself face down in the dirt, as Jack ducked down a path.
Picking himself up, Ernest rushed after him down the path, towards the sound of a rushing current.

3
I followed slowly, keeping a good distance from the pair.
“Stop! Stop you Bastard!” rang from Ernest’s lungs through the foliage.
Then I heard a breaking of branches, along with a skidding sound. The thick air smelt of musk and bog. A dampness permeated everything.

Before me the path ended in a steep plummet to the base a hundred-meter bluff. No river, but a road lay below, flowing with motor vehicles.
No sign of the two could be seen though, but a few broken branches and two sets of skid marks in the dirt. I saw no sign of them below. No splattered bodies on the pavement. They had vanished.
Leaving by another route, I passed small box shaped houses and abandoned corner stores, boarded up to no one. Cemeteries lined the roadsides, some of the oldest and most novel to be found.

No semis to roar past me on the winding country road, only crosses and signs of Masonic offspring pass me by. I stand motionless as the world spins round.
Where did the two men go? Jack and Ernest were the best of friends long ago, when I had first made their acquaintance. The murder and fright in their eyes told the story of the intervening years. Mortal enemies, they had become, and whatever oblivion they had stumbled into was no place for the fainthearted.
