Summer came and went like a migrating herd.
The children watched it pass, noting its panicky red-gold coloration, feeling increasingly disillusioned as tail after tail vanished over the fence. It was difficult to say how many children lived in the backyard. Not even the children knew. Maybe two dozen.
Birthdays came and went as well. A gift of lasting value—the only one, most of the children believed—was a bow and arrow set. The kind made of rubber and plastic. By some miracle they managed not to fight over it and took turns shooting.
Tall shadows bumped and shuffled in the house. Not having much to say or offer, or at least convinced that this was so, they only acknowledged the movements of the children now and then, bumping, shuffling, raising eyebrows. The way adult animals monitor cubs in the wild when they’re too exhausted to give fang-to-fur guidance. It didn’t matter, the children didn’t pay these shadows any mind, didn’t communicate with them, not in any meaningful sense. They were apparitions of no significance. Ghosts to be summoned when a need arose.
Now and then an arrow lodged in a tree’s branches. When this happened the children would bang on the sliding glass doors and a shadow hunched over a computer would get up and grunt open the calcified door frame. It would get a ladder from the shed and retrieve the arrow with ungainly movements. Step up. Step up. Step down.
Can’t it move any faster? thought the children. We have a trajectory. We have school in the morning.
Even so the pattern was set, with Arrows in the branches! a constant complaint. Paths were laid out, paths in the grass and between the trees and between the houses. Life followed these paths, it wasn’t open for debate. If you couldn’t keep track, if your aim was off, you had to try again and again or you’d never survive.
Eventually the children came to see the inside shadows as painted figures, moving only when colors shifted on TVs and computer screens. They were stony, ancient, fragile in sunlight. The shadow who got up to get the arrows wasn’t any different. We make him, said the children to each other. If we stop, he stops, so don’t stop.
But night seeped in and everybody had to quit and go to sleep. Children crawled into shelters, mumbled stories to each other, reassured themselves of a future. Far away summer could still be herd, stampeding and screaming and perishing. Inside, the computer phantom hunched, pressed buttons, looked things up and tried to learn. It looked up SMS and quantitative UX and arrow and trajectory, but nothing made any sense.
At two in the morning a child woke up quick and alert, remembering a final missile dangling from a knot of leaves. It was still up there. But we don’t have anybody now, thought the child. I might have to do this myself.
Autumnal chill had settled in. The shed seemed like a long walk away, and there wasn’t any light. When would it be light out?
Open your ears, everyone.
This is the sound of a cave door sliding open.
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