Around an Imaginary Center

They made a dual layer circle around an imaginary center. The children were in the inner circle, facing each other in their recently purchased clothes their parents had insisted they get since it wasn’t in good manners to make a first impression with pants that barely reached the top of their good son’s pointy ankles or beautiful daughter’s dainty feet. Deep navy blue long-sleeved shirts and khakis numbered as the most popular items purchased from the local mall. One girl had long brown hair, combed to a shine and a purple clip sitting on display around the top of her head, to assist her to see better without the bangs falling, so effortlessly and with such sex appeal, into her green eyes. His arm hair poked out from beneath his pushed up sleeves. They all stood near tree stumps, arranged – assumedly – by the owners of the site to demarcate where people should be. This was no new gathering, rather one ritualized to the owners, each time the participants virgin to the experience, or at least the group dynamic. Eleven children stood, sat, or kneeled by the stump, staring out at each other. Meat market with no intention of any slaughter, slaying, laying, or devouring. Simply kids in as the candy store.

The autumnal air drifted around, swirled by the group, numbering two to one adults to children. Leaves clung with a dry sense of survival to branches greyed by the overcast background. Five trees lined the circumference of the human circle, all stretching their limbs over the circle’s center, as offering in case a storm decided to erupt mid-gathering. During summer, the sun’s heat penetrated with limited success down to the normally hat-donning participants, anxious and sweating from not the yellow rays spreading what would be glee in children’s books but from questions racing through their capped heads as to what would unfold in front of them.

The five trees stood at the cusp not only of the circle, but also at the edge of the hill that fell around the plateau. Five trees in a crescent moon figuration with a rectangular club house fit into the moon’s opening. Glass panels lined the house’s wall facing the group. Inside, dark wood made the floors, pillars, and walls. Door frames were a shade darker. Some participants believed the wood to have come from the trees that once stood and now marked by their stumps here in the gathering spot.

Beyond, deep valleys of golden hue rolled onto more mountains lined with evergreens. Behind him, drove the light brown sugared hue dirt road. No more than one hundred feet were visible, since it dropped off again. Twisted and turned right then left then right with light brush beside it the whole way. Beyond the tall grasses and short shrubs sat the chestnut colored trunks of trees soon to be tall and magnificent. Their branches came close, but didn’t complete the leaf bridge protecting the road from the sun’s energizing power leaving the path faded and muted in color.

The children all shifted back and forth, waiting for the training to start in the rising light. Leaf shadows imprinted themselves on the center of the circle and he gazed not at the young girl across from him, adorned in a deep pink frock with an attached white belt, and three quarter length sleeves. She had a powder blue thick head band helping her see with clarity in preparation for the future. Whatever that might be.

A tall man with albino white hair stepped forward from behind one of the boys to his right. The boy had black hair, as close to being brown without being brown. A green collared shirt draped over his slight shoulders and lay limp over his flat chest and concave stomach as with his father. The father turned his head left and caught eyes with the properly trimmed bangs, slightly greased hair, blue pushed back sleeves, and feverish eyes. Passionate eyes caught the glare back and, as if a nod were enacted, the father began to speak of the games ahead. Children internally reeled with anxious excitement. The parents faded, slowly, to the five trees and started to climb them. From above, they would watch. From above, they would see the grand scheme of movements, of slightly whipping air, and watch chosen leaves depart their parental branches and drift down, flipping as they went showing both top and bottom to children and adults.

The trimmed bangs stayed in place and he dipped in and out between the tree’s self-made grave stones and girls and albinoed father’s son. The girls’ frocks and khakis and dresses danced on the breezes sweeping around the plateau and followed loyally to the beat and hop of the owners. No watches were allowed, so sweat marked the passing of time. Water breaks weren’t built in, and the albino father paced between club house and circle’s edge. He prepared sandwiches for the dangling adults in an open window and watched the sun drip closer to the horizon’s edge. The golden hues and honey soaked fields beckoned the adults down from the tree tops and asked for pumpkins to be set around the circle to note that the training was over for the day. Blue sweater with arm hair poking out, now seeping out with a heft from the accompanying sweat, had a mole on his right cheek, closer to his nose than to his ear. The mole wasn’t large, but it was noticeable. As were the trees of all saturations to him, and he took strides toward the opposite side of the circle, to take in the images. Through his eyes, the tree tops looked perfectly round, dotting the mountain side with greens, reds, crimsons, pinks, chartruse, teal, and purple. The colors didn’t bleed into each other, rather they stood out with prominence, pride, and power.

He stared at these colors from the top of a bench constructed from four two by fours between two crates. Between two stumps acting as crates. One was labeled Brazil. One, unmarked.

The others sat and reclined, and the adults sat in the club house in deep green chairs with light brown arm rests and golden flecks throughout. The chandelier above the table in the dining room wasn’t gaudy, but rather tied together with the natural environment around and outside and mosquitoes didn’t find the plateau consequently letting the children sit outside without bother.

Right cheeked mole stood, trying to train his eyes to magnify the tree’s colors in the last dregs of light on this day. He stood, moving back and forth, pacing, on the bench. The left sock had slouched its way down to his boney ankle, ceasing to create a clean line from shoe to sock to pant, rather gathering and creating tidal waves between the light brown leather shoe with one buckle and the pants his adults insisted that he purchase with their money.

Another boy, with khaki shorts and cargo pockets, long sleeved white polo now adorning three grass stains and one streak of dirt, watched the back and forth of the standing boy. He watched as the boy leaned closer. He saw through the boy’s eyes, the magnificent colors spread out before him. He saw as the boy crept left to avoid the overhanging branch and slipped foot with crumpled sock onto the Brazilian labeled crate. The crate had appeared sturdy, seeing as it supported half of a bench upon which the boy paced. It appeared solid since it came from Brazil, a far away land with stories of beauty and exoticism and foods unknown to these boys and girls and adults. The adults sat inside eating sandwiches and drinking port.

The buzzing started immediately. The gentle hum of the sinking sun and quieting flora and roaming fauna was overtaken by the at first buzz then violent screaming on behalf of the hornets that lay resting in the Brazilian crate. Children, at once devoid of rest, scattered into the club house by ways of the front and back entrance. The adults heard the clamor from inside the glass lined home. Blue shirt cheek mole was stuck. His left foot sunk quickly into what he soon to find out was a bee-hive. The hornets flew out in a fury, levitating his foot back out. Ducking and rolling as if he were in a 1950’s nuclear bomb scare, looking for some sort of desk-shelter from the explosive rage, he steamrolled a pumpkin, splitting it in half.

The orange rind seemed a calming color amongst the crimson future he may be facing. Grabbing a quarter of the pumpkin, the boy took off in a sprint not toward the transparent house, but toward the beige almost colorless road, toward the hill.

Taking deep strides against his winged oppressors, he shot past the tall grasses. The angle of the hill aided his flight and adrenalin pumped furiously into his veins, legs, and knees.

He placed the pumpkin on his head, letting the strings and seeds dangle and fall past his ears, giving heat relief and natural helmet against the sharp harpoons attached to the hornets. He twisted right, left, and a gentle right as the road went from forty five degrees to thirty to ten to zero and he ran with the horizon. Out to his right stretched a farm cut into the woods supporting what seemed to be exclusively corn. Half way around the crescent bend in the road sat a small cottage, all terrain vehicle and old man with no more than two hundred hairs on the top of his head with a horse shoed white perimeter. The elderly wore light overalls, buckled on one side, a coat similar to man in the local salvation army – that being a beige coat with two large check marks of two colors (blue and red) on the shoulder. He paid the boy no mind as he gained then lost speed and distance against the ever approaching bees. Yelling to the man from two hundred feet back, the boy pleaded in segmented breaths for help. The older man, slow on foot but mentally quick, started the vehicle and waited for the boy to slide onto the back of the ATV. Perched and ready to flee, the old man ushered the moled boy on.

The engine revved. The boy abandoned the pumpkin in hopes that the bees would take that as the original criminal. He slid onto the black leather seat and grabbed hold of loves’ handles. The boy took off at twenty miles per hour, sitting down, onto the road, around the bend and into the tree covered road ahead as the sun sank completely past the hill, putting day to rest and awaking twilight.