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Man, what I would give to go back to those old days. Days of runnin’ through the dark and hollerin’ at the moon and all that for no real reason, other than that we were little and free and we just felt like it. Back then, we’d go huntin’ for ghosts and monsters in the back fields and come home redder than a man from Mars from all that iron in the dirt. We’d smear the grime off our faces in the janky little mirrors on our bathroom walls and grin toothily at our reflections, admiring our fresh bruises in the shape of fingerprints and knuckle marks.
Those were the days.
Back then we was everything, me and my friends. We ruled the world under the dim glow of the lamps our folks would leave on our porches to lead us back home. We clutched dull knives and walked around reekin’ of the pond that we swam in when our mamas were busy with other things and our daddies were off in the mines. We didn’t know what was beyond the hills in the distance where the trains came from, but hell, we knew it must’a belonged to us.
I remember that my daddy would come home late at night as black and dusty as the coal he mined. He wasn’t around much, him, being gone from sunrise to sunset, and my mama was always tired and sore from her own long hours. Neither of them are around no more, and I didn’t know ’em well enough to miss ’em proper. Folks around here don’t last so long. We learn that when we’re young.
You don’t get used to this town like you do other places. It doesn’t grow on you, like somethin’ you learn to love. Nah, it grows inside you like a wild bramble, ugly and old and stinkin’ with rot.
But as kids, man, we never noticed.
Nothin’ interesting ever happened back then. From the time I was born to the time I was about nine or ten, me and the boys made our own fun.
That was, until Billy got a job in the mines. It was the best day of the year.
