Sanctuary

That’s how Eddie remembers it

The wooded lot between the laundry mat and the QuikStop couldn’t really be called a forest, but Eddie did anyway. As a boy, Eddie and his friends would hack their way through the scrub and trees with sticks they’d found.

Once they got far enough, the dappled light and pockets of shade seemed a form of enchantment that could hold them for hours. They set up camp and whacked mosquitoes and learned the art of bullshitting.

In junior high, when the privacy of the woods was necessary to drink the six-pack from the QuikStop that they’d bribed an old-timer to get for them, they still played the games of their boyhood, capture the flag, and hide and go seek and bloody knuckles.

When his friends started to bring girls into the woods, Eddie stayed away but in eighth grade, there was a girl on his bus who smelled like Big Red and apple shampoo and made fun of him for not having a girlfriend. He dared her to come into the woods with him and she dared him to give her a real kiss. Her cinnamon tongue held him captive until she ditched him for a freshman.

In high school, he went there by himself. His parents had split up and on paydays, his dad always ended up with a bottle of bourbon and a dark mood.

Eddie listened to the birds in the treetops. One night at dusk he saw a gray fox who lingered in front of him for more than a minute.

“I see you,” he told the fox. “I know you.”

He was in the army when they cleared the lot to build a car wash. On leave one Christmas with his wife and baby, Eddie washed the truck there. He felt something. Couldn’t say what.

February Theme: Wilderness Lost, 300 words exactly. Thank you Zane Dickens!