Fiction
Jeremy and the Magic Place
And she told him she’d call him when it was time
Jeremy slides on his bottom down the steeper part, his palms scuffed and burning from the pebbles and scrub bark. Distant mountains, like snuggled rodents, lose their hold on the darkness and give up their slumber to the glow of dawn. His bare feet search the dark for the chuckholes and roots that match the crude map in his brain. Night after night, he had lain on his cot next to soft-snoring Franklin on his cot, and Mama, the other side of the woodstove, moaning with each exhale, and he’d close his eyes and follow himself down every inch of the slope until it flattened out to the bank of the creek. But it was always a daylight map.
Stay way dat crik, boy. Dis ol’ heart cain’t tek two buryin’s.
Jeremy finds the chuckhole that stops his descent and squints back over his shoulder up beyond the smooth place at the ridge where he started, and past it, up under the huge ash-white moon to the drooping rooftop that Franklin cardboard-patched two days earlier out of the box Mister Pardoo put the milk cartons and flour bag in. Not once taking his eyes off Franklin, Jeremy had pulled away from the stove and began to rock on one leg and then the other with the argument hanging wordless in his throat and unblinkingly watched Franklin crack…
