Secret Place

Chilhood Memory

             I am thirteen years old and I have a secret place. My parent’s house is on a hill in Missouri. The house is near a street that runs along the top of the hill. The best time of the day is when I get home from school and get on my red bike and follow the rainwater down the hill. At the bottom where the houses end a little creek runs through a draw surrounded by tangled underbrush and sheltered by trees.

 I hide my bike in a big concrete drain, far inside where light ends and shadow begins.  I stop at the entrance to make sure it is well hidden, because the big kids will take my bike if they find it. There is a fence where the road dead ends, covered in kudzu that turns my palms green as I climb it. On the other side I wait and watch, peaking between the leaves to see if I have really escaped the neighborhood. It is my great fear that someone will see me cross and break the spell I cast over myself at this borderline between what I am and what I wish.

Unobserved I transform. I find my blade where I left it, a broom handle with a bike handlebar grip. In my hand it becomes a sword, a lightsabre, a hero’s weapon. In the gloom of the dense foliage I kneel a little boy not yet a man and rise a warrior feared and loved. Marching into danger, head held high. Wars are won and kingdoms saved here in the green tinted world beneath the trees. When I tire of tilting with shadow dragons and dark armies, I open my pack and unleash my greatest magic.

There is an opening that admits the sun in the center of my secret place. I have dug out the banks here in a perfect circle lining it with small stones. The water eddies and swirls before it finds its way out of my pool, and I keep it clear of fallen leaves and bracken so that it runs clear. Four circles of cleared ground surround my pool. Light is required for my magic and these spaces are a sundial. I know from my watch were I must sit to be bathed by our nearest star.

The Pages flow by painting colors in my mind, brush strokes of Avalon, landscapes of Middle Earth, and the grey metal of battle school. I hear their voices in the babbling of the water and wind through the branches. I feel the pain of their wounds the sorrow of their losses, they are more real to me then the world outside my secret place.

I sit in the fourth circle and the light fades. Creasing the corner of the page I leave the friends that matter most. I will think of them at school and worry if I have left them in peril. They need me, Ender and Bilbo and Arthur. I need them.

I strike out with my sword in hand, through the wilds to the boundary. I wish I could carry my sword with me to defend me on the other side. I hide it away and watch before I cross. Unobserved, I put back on the self that hides me.  I pull my red bike from the drain and out into the last of the light. I must return to my parent’s house before that light is gone.

I ride as fast as I can so that I will not be late and to avoid the attention of the big kids to whom torment is second nature. Reaching the top of the hill, I place my bike in the garage, and count the minutes I must survive till I return to my secret place tomorrow.

Reviews

[Yellow Butterfly]

Awesome childhood memory....

Nicely penned...

[Samuel Dickens]

Recollections from youth are precious to us and, as you've shown here, rich sources for writing. Your magical world provided an escape from bullies. I did much the same thing at that age, but to escape a horrible family life. You don't know me, but this is a favorite subject of mine. Your writing is excellent and if I said anything critical about it, it would simply a matter of personal preferences.