*cover photo taken & shared by the wonderful Lida Pavlova (@lidapavlova_magic on Instagram)
I’ll take you, but it’s not a town I know, and I’m always 13. Instead of driving, you’ll have to ride the handlebars of the second-hand bike my grandparents bought. I’ll pedal us around before dinner. I promise there aren’t any hills.
At the North end of town, there’s a double lot: one half faces Main Street, decorated with drunk people and speeding drivers, and the other half faces a quiet residential street that hasn’t changed since 1873. A small, red-brick century home with a teal roof looks across Main Street. A white, two-storey stucco building with periwinkle windowsills looks down on the 1873 neighbourhood. A paved parking pad sits between their back doors. But where I hang is in the longest backyard you’ve ever seen.
It’s not quite deep enough for our next door neighbour, Alex, who lost his license but somehow still has a car and drives it twenty metres with his rotating girlfriends cheering from the front seat. The grass is slightly overgrown—a five by twenty metre strip along the sides of both the house and building, rimmed in fruit and flower bushes. Blackberries, currants, strawberries, mint, and rhubarb lean like teenage boys along the chain link fence separating our properties from Alex’s pretend racetrack. The lilac trees perfume themselves, so each breath is more like licking pine. There are probably fifteen pines sprinkled across both properties, as if marking the graves of a whole family.
My bike tires always crunch and churn the sandy sidewalk along the side of the building, running partway to the neighbourhood street until it turns into a gravel driveway, mesh-wired off from the road. Nobody uses this entrance. My grandparents stuck sharp sticks and twigs in the holes of the mesh to dissuade folks from shortcutting through their properties to Main Street.
But I’m ready, too.
Sorry, please scooch so I can grip these sticky handlebars and look ready, because here comes dudebro Mac.
“And where do you think you’re going, Mac?”
“Oh, girl, just let me through, would ya?”
“I don’t think so. You see that pine stump back there? By that upside-down rusted boat?” I nodded toward an old steel rowboat, overturned in the weeds beside the building’s front steps.
“Yeah, so!”
“There’s an axe in it.” I grinned creepily, without wrinkling my eyes.
“Sure, sure.”
“Wanna see?”
“Nah, girl.”
“Exactly. Find another shortcut.”
Okay, get off. I’m hungry. Let’s walk back. I’ll lean the bike against the building so Alex can see I have a sweet ride, too.
***
After I told what I thought was a heroic story at the dinner table that night, Mom made me eat six brussel sprouts. Six instead of zero!
“Anne, you cannot say it like that.” She spoke in a hushed voice so my grandparents couldn’t hear as they listened to the radio in the living room. Mom was cleaning the dishes while the pie finished baking.
“I didn’t lie!”
“No, you didn’t.” Mom allowed a splinter of a smile as she handed me a towel to dry the steak knives. “But there’s such a thing as sharing a bit too much of the truth, sometimes.”
“We only use the axe for firewood, though.”
“True. We do. But that’s not true of everyone. I know you know this because otherwise, you wouldn’t have said what you said. Don’t turn a tool into a weapon with a life you haven’t lived.”
Uh, okay. Whatever that means. “Whose axe is it anyway?” I crossed my arms and leaned against the paisley wallpaper.
“Uncle Cam’s, Anne.”
“Who’s that?”
“My brother, Anne.”
“Why don’t I know him? Why haven’t I met him?”
“Because he’s in prison, Anne.”
Mom pressed her lips together as she scrubbed the mashed potato pot.
“So who’s this character you keep seeing out back?”
I laughed out loud.
“What’s funny about that question, Anne?”
“His name is Mac! It’s Cam backwards! So weird.”
Mom narrowed her gaze on a drizzle of blue dish soap in a soup bowl, like deoxygenated blood. Her soapy hands gripped the edge of the sink.
“What’s Uncle Cam in prison for?”
“For murder, Anne.”
“Murdering who?”
“The Pines, Anne.”
“Ah, about time.”
Mom made one slow nod as the oven wheezed a beep.
Do you want to stay for dessert?
I also write notes! ❤️🔥