Penpal

by Dathan Auerbach

  “Hey man, wanna go for a swim?”

  I looked over to where he was shining the flashlight, but I closed my eyes as I did, because I now knew where we were – though I hoped that, somehow, I was wrong. Slowly and fearfully, I opened my eyes and saw that he was shining the light on a pool float. This was where I had woken up in these woods all those years ago.

  I felt a lump in my throat and the sting of fresh tears in my eyes as I continued to struggle with the walkie-talkie. I didn’t want to be there. It hadn’t even occurred to me that we might find this place, and once we did, I just wanted to keep walking and leave it behind for a second time. But as the branch clung determinedly to the strap, I found myself trapped there again.

  Frustrated, I yanked on the walkie hard enough to break the branch that held it, and I turned and walked toward Josh who had partially reclined on the pool float in a mock sunbathing pose. I didn’t want to tell Josh how I had first found this place, so I knew that I had to temper my desperation to leave it. Slowing my pace, I tried to collect myself, and Josh – either in an attempt to light my way or obscure it – shined the flashlight directly on my face. The whole world went white for a moment, and even after Josh moved the light, its impression remained.

  I couldn’t see anything, not even the hole.

  I felt the dirt around the edge of the chasm give way, and I reeled back in an attempt to regain my balance, but it was not enough. I tumbled into the crater. It was only a few feet deep, but it had a fairly large perimeter. I was puzzled. I remembered this place vividly from that night– the topography of this particular area was etched deeply into my mind – but I didn’t remember the hole. I rose to my knees as I tried to wind back my mind’s clock.

  That’s when I heard Josh scream.

  I rose to my feet quickly and scrambled out of the hole. I tried to see what was happening, but Josh had the flashlight, and its beam moved wildly through the darkness as he flailed frantically on the float. He was panicked, and as the light shot sporadically across his face, I could see it was contorted with fear and desperation.

  “What’s wrong, Josh?!” I yelled.

  But he didn’t respond with anything more than the same cries that had pulled me out of the hole. He was trying to get up, but each time he would rise up even a little, he would fall immediately back onto the float, and the whole process would begin anew. I wanted to help Josh, but I couldn’t move myself any closer – my legs wouldn’t cooperate. I hated these woods. Josh threw the flashlight to free his hand, and I stared at it, still unable to break my paralysis.

  It wasn’t until Josh roared coherently that he needed help that I was able to force myself to move. I ran and grabbed the discarded flashlight; I shined it on my friend, not knowing what to expect. The light washed over his body, and I could see that he was writhing violently, the weathered and worn shark-shaped float distending underneath him. At first, I couldn’t see anything near him that could be causing his panic. I shifted my gaze from the surroundings and back onto Josh and stepped closer. His plight came into view.

  Spiders.

  There were dozens of them crawling in criss-crossing patterns along his arms and across his torso. There must have been a clutch of them in the float. The closer I got, the more there seemed to be as my eyes became better able to distinguish their small bodies. Josh’s hands repeatedly returned to his face to wipe it clean of any spiders that might make the journey up there. His frightened and rapid movements stood once again in stark contrast to my resumed static state. Josh was not really afraid of spiders, at least not by the thought or sight of them, but I was. I stood there and wished that Josh had been plagued by something else – anything else. But I had to do something for him; he would have done something for me.

  Setting the flashlight on the ground, I ran to my friend and shut all thoughts of the spiders out of my mind – if I thought about them, I would stop thinking about helping Josh. I grabbed his arms and leveraged back, pulling him up as steadily and strongly as I could. Once on his feet, he yanked off his shirt and began savagely beating it against the ground while I tried to brush the remaining spiders from his arms and neck.

  When the urgency had passed, we stood there for a moment surveying one another and ourselves; picking and brushing the odd spider off the other, and occasionally slapping our hands against our own bodies in response to some tickling rogue hair or leaf. From a distance, we must have looked like two monkeys with neurological disorders. When the danger seemed to have passed and the spasms stopped, I bent down, picked up Josh’s shirt, and handed it to him. He snatched it out of my hands and shook it violently in case there were any stowaway arachnids, and after he pulled it over his head and slid his arms through, he leaned forward and said with the kind of tone you might hear in someone’s voice as they were punctuating a great argument with a final point, “Fuck spiders.”

  We walked on.

  I had my bearings back, and Josh knew that we were in my part of the woods, so he dropped back a little and I took the lead. We were getting closer to my house now, so we became more focused on what had brought us into the woods in the first place.

  Boxes was my cat, but Josh had known him for almost as long as I had – so long, in fact, that Josh had his own set of stories about my cat. When we were in first grade, Josh was staying at my house for the night and was sleeping on the bottom bunk. At some point while he slept, Boxes climbed in bed with him and was still there when he woke up the next morning. Josh told me that when he opened his eyes Boxes was laying about a foot away from his face and was staring right at him. Josh said, or at least implied, that for a moment he felt like they were sharing something special – that they were making some kind of a connection. This moment lasted right up until Josh smiled and Boxes smacked him in the face with his clawless paws, quickly and repeatedly, just before he dashed out of the room, leaving Josh dazed. Of course, I didn’t witness any of this, but I was somewhat privy to the conclusion since Josh’s shouts were what woke me up that morning.

  That night, as we walked through the woods, drawing ever closer to my old house, we took turns telling different parts of that story to one another.

  We continued on our path, but as we passed the pile of dead Christmas trees, its weathered ornaments still healthy enough to catch the faintest light and cast it away, what Josh had said earlier in our journey still tugged at my thoughts. I confronted him abruptly.

  “Why’d you say what you said back there?”

  “What? About Boxes biting me on the nose? I swear he did!”

  “No. Not that. You asked how far we could go into the woods. Why’d you ask that?”

  “Huh? Oh. I dunno. I thought it’d be funny.”

  “Yeah, but where’d you hear that question? Why would you ask me that?” I was trying not to let on that it had upset me.

  “It’s that riddle. You told me that stupid riddle in kindergarten.”

  “What? I don’t remember that.”

  “C’mon. Are you serious? It was the day we let our balloons go. I guess you finished your work, or – yeah that’s right, because it was before your paper got all messed up – you came up to me when I was finishing mine, and we started talking about how we’d explore the woods at your house and stuff. And then you asked me how far I could go into the woods, but I didn’t know what you meant, and when I tried to answer you, you just kept asking that stupid question over and over.”

  “Oh yeah!”

  Josh started laughing. “And then you said I’d just have to figure it out, and you tried to be all mysterious. But then you just blurted the answer out like ten seconds later!”

  “Oh yeah …”

  “No wonder you forgot! Who’d want to remember blowing a joke so bad!”

  He punched me lightly in the arm, and I shoved him back playfully. We laughed as we walked through The Ditch.

  We were back in my old neighborhood, and suddenly the task at hand seemed much more daunting. It was probably about one o’clo
ck in the morning; most of the houses were dark inside, and there were no streetlights in this part of my old neighborhood, so our flashlight cut sharply through the darkness, and we saw only what the beam hit. I started to wonder how we were going to find Boxes in such blackness. I found myself wishing we had another flashlight.

  The last time I had rounded the bend that was ahead of us, I had seen my house fully illuminated, and there was a part of me that expected to find it in the same state as Josh and I pressed forward and the roof of my house appeared over the others. All the memories of what transpired that night came flooding back. In the woods, I had been hit with waves of flashes from the past from that winter night when I was six, and they would break and retreat back into the reservoir of my mind. But as I retraced my path on the paved road back to my house, for a moment, Josh seemed to fade away, and every step seemed to hurt as if my feet had once again been cut open by the sharp sticks and thorny bushes of the woods’ undergrowth. Although I was wearing shoes this time, I could almost feel the small asphalt pebbles that had wedged themselves into the cuts on the soles of my feet the last time I made this journey.

  “There’s your house,” Josh whispered.

  I snapped out of my daze and felt a skipping in my heart as we finally turned the corner, about to face the full view of my house. I remembered how incandescent it had been last time, how light had poured out from every window. But this time all the lights were off; suddenly, my feet didn’t hurt anymore.

  From a distance, I could see my old climbing tree. It looked smaller than I remembered, but my memories of scaling that tree had transformed it into a redwood in my mind. I could make out the rim of branches that were lowest to the ground – the ones that I used to sit on when I first learned how to climb. That tree was the source of many memories for me, and they were all good ones, even the one where I had fallen.

  It had been in that same spot years before I was in any spot at all, oblivious to all that transpired around it or who it had affected, and it would probably remain there after I was gone if it was left alone. As my mind traced the steps of causality backward, I realized that I wouldn’t be back here this night if that tree hadn’t grown, and I was briefly in awe of how all events were like that.

  As we got closer, I could see that the grass in the yard now reached half the height of the chain link fence that encircled it – I couldn’t even guess when it had last been mowed. One of the window shutters had partially broken loose and was awkwardly rocking back and forth in the breeze. Overall the house just looked dirty, as if a thin film of grime and grease had coated the whole building, despite whatever rain there had been. It had never even occurred to me that a whole house could get filthy. I was sad to see my old home in such a state of disrepair. Why would my mom care if we bothered the new owners if they cared so little about where they lived? And then I realized:

  There were no new owners.

  The house was abandoned, though it looked simply forsaken. It dawned on me how much work my mother must have put into the maintenance of the house if this is what it looked like when no one bothered; it was like seeing an old friend who had become terminally ill, and it broke my heart. I couldn’t help but wonder why my mom would lie to me about our house having new occupants – maybe she just didn’t want me to see it like this.

  Despite how sad it made me, I realized that this vacancy was actually a good thing. Since there was no one to take care of the house, there was no one to stop us from looking for my cat. It would be so much easier to look around for Boxes if we didn’t have to worry about being spotted by the new family. This meant that we could probably make it out of there faster, which was our top priority. Josh interrupted my thoughts as we walked through the gate and up to the house itself.

  “Your old house sucks, dude!” Josh yelled as quietly as he could.

  “Shut up, Josh! Even like this it’s probably still more fun than your house.”

  “Hey man—”

  “Okay, okay. I think Boxes is probably under the house. One of us has to go under and look, but the other should stay next to the opening in case he comes running out.”

  For a moment, I kicked myself for not bringing an electric can-opener from Josh’s house, forgetting that there would have been no electricity to power it here.

  “Are you serious? There’s no way I’m going under there. It’s your cat, man. You do it.”

  That should have settled the question of who went in after Boxes, but I wasn’t going to forfeit so quickly; any chance I had of not crawling under the house was worth taking.

  “Look, I’ll game you for it, unless you’re too scared …” I said holding my fist over my upturned palm.

  “Fine, but we go on ‘shoot,’ not on three. It’s ‘rock, paper, scissors, shoot,’ not ‘one, two, three.’”

  “I know how to play the game, Josh. You’re the one who always messes up. And it’s two out of three.”

  We each balled one hand into a fist and held it over our palms. I began the count, and on each word we thrust our hands downward in a stabbing motion until they collided with our palms.

  “Rock, paper, scissors, SHOOT!”

  I brought my hand down maintaining the fist and held it there. Josh’s hands clapped on his final throw. His paper beat my rock.

  We began again.

  “Rock, paper, scissors, SHOOT!”

  I guessed that Josh would count on me throwing rock again, and I almost did. At the last second, I changed my mind and laid my hands together flatly. I looked at Josh. He was pointing two fingers at me as if to signal the number two. He had guessed what I’d do or had just gotten lucky – either way, his scissors beat my paper.

  I lost.

  It was obvious that Josh wanted to gloat, but he restrained himself; he wasn’t happy that anyone had to go under this house. I wiggled loose the panel that my mom would always move when she had to crawl after Boxes. I had removed it myself only once, but that had been a long time ago – I pushed it in hard and then twisted it a little before pulling it out and resting it against the side of the house. My mom only had to crawl underneath the house a handful of times since the can-opener trick usually worked; but when she had to do it, she hated it, especially that final time. As I looked into the darkness of the crawlspace, I had a greater appreciation for why that was.

  Before we moved, my mother said that it was actually better that Boxes ran under here, despite how hard it could be to get him out. It was less dangerous than him jumping over the fence and running around the neighborhood. All that was true, but I was still dreading going into the crawlspace.

  I turned back toward Josh and smirked.

  “Best five out of seven?”

  He laughed and told me to watch my head on the way in.

  I grabbed the flashlight and the walkie and began to crawl into the opening. Upon setting my hand on the ground underneath the house, I realized that I was about to ruin my favorite shirt. The ground of the crawlspace was nothing more than damp dirt, which would create a problem for the white shirt I was wearing. My mom had gotten it for me at a souvenir shop when we visited my grandparents the previous year. It had an iguana wearing sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt, lying in a beach chair and sipping a drink out of a glass with a straw. Beneath the lizard in big, green letters, it said “IGUANA ‘NOTHER FLY TAI!” I had no idea what this meant, but after about ten minutes of nagging, my mom paid to have the design ironed onto a shirt my size. My mind started turning; there would be no way for me to come out of this exploration without being filthy, and I would have to explain the state of my clothes to Josh’s parents. This complicated things; I turned back toward Josh.

  “Hey, I can’t be the one who goes under, man. It’ll ruin my shirt, and your parents will know we were outside.”

  Josh stood there with a slightly amused but quizzical look on his face. Finally, he answered, “Wait, you’re serious? Dude, look at your shirt.”

  I looked down and saw that it already advertised
my activities with thick skids of soil that streaked up and down and across it. I felt slightly foolish. We had just walked through the woods, I had fallen in a hole, but I still pictured my shirt in mint condition. I played it off as if it was a joke and turned back toward the opening. As I moved the upper half of my body into the crawlspace, my concerns turned to other things as a powerful smell overtook me.

  It smelled like death.

  I turned on my walkie. Josh, are you there?

  This is Macho Man, come back.

  Josh, cut it out. There’s something wrong down here.

  What do you mean?

  It stinks. It smells like something died.

  Oh man, is it Boxes?

  I really hope not.

  I set down the walkie and oscillated the flashlight as I crawled forward a little, trying to survey as much as possible from my current position. Looking through the hole from the outside, you could see all the way back with the right lighting, but you had to be inside the crawlspace to see around the support blocks that held the house up. I’d say that about forty percent of the area wasn’t visible unless you were actually in the crawlspace, but even inside I could only see directly where the flashlight was pointing; this would make scouting around the place much more difficult. I tried to call my cat.

  “Boxes …”

  I paused and listened.

  “Booooxxxxeessss …”

  There was no sound or movement. I tried clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth, but there was no response to that either. Pressing my hands hard against the earth, I pulled myself forward until my feet slipped past the opening and into the crawlspace. As I moved farther into the void, the smell intensified to the point that it stung my nostrils. If I covered my nose with my hand, I couldn’t properly leverage myself in the cramped space. This meant that in order to move I had to breathe the air directly.

  When I tried breathing through my mouth, the stench in the air layered on my tongue and coated the inside of my cheeks to the point that I could actually taste it. For the entire journey from Josh’s house to my old home, I had hoped that we’d find Boxes here, but now the fear was growing in me that Boxes had come here and something had happened to him. I began hoping for the first time that I wouldn’t find Boxes after all.