Hide and Seek

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Today's story is Hide and Seek.

Written by Patrick Harald.

Are you ready?

Sit back.

Turn down the lights.

And now, on with the show.

Once, I sprawled out right on the side of the big wood pile.

Hidden in plain sight.

Watching their flashlight beams is a search the fields and patches of woods.

I was stock still, avoiding both splinters and seekers.

I won't pretend that my cousins never found me when we played nighttime hide and seek.

But I was good.

Something about being right there, while they swarmed the fields was flat out hilarious.

Maybe it was the thought that if they just thought to look over in this obvious place,

they'd find me right away.

But seeing them scramble all over the property and futility instead?

Well, it was hard work holding in my laughter that night.

So different from how it felt later on that summer.

On that last night, at Uncle Wayne's.

I wouldn't have admitted this at the time,

but I was actually still a little scared of the dark.

This lent an edge to those activities.

A sense of danger, but adventure too.

They couldn't see me, but I could see them.

I was there.

Between 6th and 8th grade, I spent the better part of each summer at my Uncle Wayne's house.

It was him, my aunt Raich, and four cousins.

Rob, Andrew, Steve, and Richie.

This is lower rural Michigan.

In the bottomless pocket between the city's everyone knows about.

It doesn't get much more rural than that unless you go way up north.

My cousins and I were quite a crew.

I didn't have any brothers, and I wasn't released to hang out with my friends very often outside of school.

So when we all got together on that big country property,

the days passed with a lot of tag team wrestling, stick fighting,

and other things that could only end in tears.

But more than anything, we painted miniatures and played tabletop war games,

but hide and seek, that was for the night.

We hid in the dark.

You wouldn't get it if you just played hide and seek indoors,

or in some small suburban backyard.

We weren't hiding out in some tiny rectangle of land in LaVonia.

This was field and woods.

Uncle Wayne let the grass grow long.

With occasional past moan through the fields,

and they were dotted with small cops as a trees.

The woods were mainly in the back, forming a buffer before you hit the neighbor's property.

Now of course, we had to have some ground rules,

because finding each other in that environment was kind of a tall order.

Especially because with our brand of hide and seek,

you could actually run if you were spotted from a distance,

introducing a kind of tag element to the game.

Or maybe it's better to say that it was like capture the flag,

except you were the flag.

We even the odds by giving all the seekers flashlights,

pairs of each if we were all in even numbers.

And if you had nowhere to run, or a seeker got within about ten feet of you,

while they could still see you, well then you lost.

This put an end to shenanigans like when Richie climbed a tree

higher than the rest of us could get,

which made him unfindable on a technicality.

Even Richie's hiding partner Andrew, already caught,

thought that move was ridiculous when he tried it.

And we ended up going back inside,

leaving him to climb down all alone in that cool summer darkness.

What I'm saying basically is that we were living our best lives.

Uncle Wayne's friend had a son about our age,

and he'd come over from time to time.

I'll be honest, I can't remember the kid's name,

but I remember his sister, Misty.

She was a year or two older than me.

I didn't know that he had any siblings.

So when she walked into the basement,

I wondered who this girl and the navy tank top and gray sweatpants was.

I was also a little embarrassed,

given that I was currently putting the finishing touches on a small plastic orc.

I felt better right away when she introduced herself as so-and-so sister,

giving me a smile that turned up just a little bit more on the left side than the right.

Don't get me wrong, this wasn't some adolescent love at first sight situation.

I had an unrequited crush on a girl in my grade at the time,

and when I met Misty, I didn't feel anything like that.

But I won't forget the night that we got paired up to hide together.

It was the last time that I saw Misty's brother,

and the first and last time that I saw her.

This would have been late July,

my final night at Uncle Wayne's house that year.

One thing I didn't mention earlier,

and something a lot of people don't really get,

is the stars out in the country.

It might sound corny,

but those stars are something that anyone's spinning all their time

in the light pollution of Detroit,

Lansing, or the Tri-Cities won't have experienced.

It's like a tapestry,

so bright and so varied.

I feel bad for anyone who grew up with nothing but glow in the dark stars

and moons on their bedroom ceiling,

and they were out in force that night.

Not a cloud in the sky,

and a not quite full moon.

Maybe I'm making it sound like I was some budding astronomer,

but the truth is I didn't know anything beyond the Big Dipper.

But all the same, I still appreciated it.

The way they gently spot the,

what felt like endless rolling fields to my young eyes,

when Misty and I went out back to hide.

We hadn't exchanged more than a few words before setting out,

and we immediately focused on the task at hand.

So where to?

I paused and scanned the surroundings,

what was visible at least,

as if I didn't know every square inch of Uncle Wayne's land.

You lead the way, I said.

Let's go over here.

She set off at pace.

The way our path angled,

we were on the verge of leaving the property,

up toward the front,

far off to one side of the house.

As it turned out,

I didn't know every inch of the place.

Misty led me to a dense-looking bundle of bushes

at the very far corner of the property line,

or maybe even just outside of it.

It's possible that we would trust passing,

but that was low on my list of priorities at the time.

I wanted to hide well,

and I wanted her to be happy.

I wanted her to smile at me again.

I know, I know.

As I looked over my shoulder,

the house was barely visible.

Straight ahead of us,

was the corner where the two property lines intersected.

If we were to stand at that bundle of bushes,

and turn around,

within that 90-degree span,

where the fields and the patches of trees,

soon to be infiltrated by my two cousins,

who would also be hiding,

then by the last cousin,

a Misty's little brother,

who would be seeking all of us out.

Whoever they found first

would join in the hunt for the final pair,

who, if I had it my way,

would be Misty and I,

and I just knew that this was a great hiding place.

The bushes were on the periphery,

far from where your eye might be drawn

as you walked out of Uncle Wayne's back door,

and they looked impenetrable.

A tangle of split twigs and thorny shoots

that reminded me of the watercolor background

of an old Disney movie.

Part of a dark,

foreboding forest,

meant to impart some kind of message to kids.

But we managed to get in.

On hands and knees,

with me holding whip-like branches

so they wouldn't snap back into Misty's face,

she crawled in behind me.

Inside,

it was unexpectedly cozy,

with a natural gap

between the bushes we crawled through,

and a central core of dense vegetation.

There may have been a tree stump in there.

It was too dark to tell.

Despite that,

it was well lit

because the gap meant

that while we could only see the field

out ahead of us semi-clearly,

the star shown directly down on us,

where we sat,

illuminating the interior.

I noticed a certain taste in the air inside.

I couldn't explain how,

but it reminded me of feathers,

which for some reason,

I rationalized as nearly invisible cobwebs.

We sat close together,

because of the tangle of twigs and branches behind us,

which was actually pretty narrow.

If we wanted it as a backrest,

which we did,

it meant sitting with my right shoulder,

up against Misty's left.

It occurred to me,

that as we were sitting there,

I'd never been alone with a girl before.

It felt electric.

That makes it sound like something happened

in there that didn't.

Well, something happened,

but nothing like that.

By the time we were settled,

my hiding cousins must have been out of the house.

I didn't pay attention to that,

and I didn't really care at the time.

I was sure that they'd found some predictable spot

and would be quickly found out anyway.

But I did hope that we'd found our place

before they made it out to the field,

and potentially saw our spot.

If they did,

they could play coy after being caught

and lead the seekers to us pretty quickly.

And I wanted more time than that.

I told Misty about my own small town in Mid-Mishigan,

and my slight fear of high school,

which combined the student bodies

of three local junior highs.

High school ain't that bad.

It's almost like starting over.

What do you mean?

Well, if you got a class with 30 kids,

it sounds like 20 of them won't know anything about you.

She took the lock of hair that had fallen

from its messy ponytail back behind her ear.

I thought about my crush, Amanda,

and how when I called her,

she'd hung up on me after saying that the signal was bad.

When I tried calling her house again,

she said the same thing until I got the hint.

I spoke up again.

But if 20 of them don't know me,

the other 10 could tell them about me.

Or you could before they get the chance to.

Or just show them who you are, you know?

I don't really know how to do that.

I think you should just be you.

You seem nice.

Just make an effort, you know?

Talk to people.

Don't wait for them to come up

with some conclusion about you first.

Is that what you did?

No.

Do you think anyone would even lock me?

I laughed,

taking it for the joke that it was.

But I hadn't learned how people can hide

something important behind their humor.

I still think back to that,

and I wish that I could have given her some reassurance.

I certainly liked her for one.

She fidgeted a bit.

I thought to get more comfortable,

but she ended up sitting even closer.

She sat like that for a while, the two of us.

Do you believe in God?

She asked it suddenly.

I could see the flashlight beams bouncing around

out in the field now.

I told her that I didn't know for sure.

I thought I did,

and then I asked her she did.

When I turned to look at her,

she was looking up.

I'm not sure either.

I don't know about God exactly,

but I feel like something has to be out there, you know?

Yeah, I said,

looking up with her at all the stars.

It was such a beautiful night.

It would have been too perfect to hold her hand.

I remembered something Uncle Wayne told me earlier in that summer.

You don't need to chase perfect.

Finished is better than perfect.

He said this as he sat down the last of his 30 peasant archers

in a gray and blue color scheme,

all finished and looking authentically medieval,

ready to lay down their lives.

I was still working on my fifth of 20 models.

When I stole another glance,

I noticed that Misty was gazing up very intently,

like she was studying something up there.

What are you looking at?

Ready to get shut down with the sky, obviously.

But instead, she pointed.

It took me a minute pointing at the sky

isn't the most specific thing that one can do,

but then I saw it.

Or maybe it's more accurate to say,

I couldn't see it.

I couldn't see whatever it was that she couldn't see.

There was an area off to the left of the Big Dipper,

where there weren't any stars.

None at all.

Do you see it?

I didn't answer it first.

I was trying to make sense of it,

but was thinking about how it just didn't seem like a cloud.

I'd seen partly cloudy night skies before.

A cloud would block the stars out, but this was different.

It wasn't a normal sky.

It made me think of when the sky would turn green

over our backyard right before a tornado warning.

That sky meant run inside,

but I'd rarely wanted to stay outside more than now.

Finally, I came up with something,

and just asked her if it could be a black hole.

I don't think so.

It feels wrong.

I mean, a black hole would be wrong too, I guess.

But this is just giving me the weirdest feeling.

And wouldn't we already be dead if it was a black hole?

I told her I didn't know.

I shuffled a little bit closer to her.

It's freaking me out.

I don't know if I want to be out here anymore.

Damn it.

I started to say that there was nothing to be afraid of,

when Misty clutched my arm.

She shushed me, pointing again, this time straight ahead.

It was one of my cousins,

or maybe it was Misty's brother,

passing through about a hundred feet ahead of us,

shining a flashlight through the tall grass.

It looked to me like the beam was only shifting a bit side to side,

so whoever it was basically just revealed a slightly jumpy straight line.

No wonder they were so easy to hide from.

But one of the others must have been closer,

because I could hear their flashlight.

It was clicking repeatedly as they turned it on and off.

I couldn't see where they were.

There was no light in view.

Maybe it was a low battery,

or it wasn't screwed together right.

I tapped Misty's shoulder and held a finger up to my mouth,

and she nodded with a half smile.

The thrill of hiding when there was a seeker so near,

like any activity truly worth doing,

it blocks everything out for a time.

No more worries about the sky.

We watched the beam half hidden in the grass

as it trailed off to the distance,

back toward the others.

We could see one, two, three,

four more beams out there,

scattered across the far side of the property.

A total of five,

my cousins and Misty's brother.

This meant that Steve and Richie had both been found already,

and they'd been given their flashlights.

But how did whoever had that malfunctioning one

get all the way over there so fast?

I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

They're never gonna find us, are they?

No way, I said.

Now Misty was the calm one,

and I felt like I was freaking out.

I looked out at the overgrown passage

that we'd forced our way through to get in here.

How fast could we get back out?

Or maybe more importantly,

how fast could something,

or someone, get in?

As I scanned the fields again,

I could hear my cousins' voices.

I couldn't make out what they were calling.

It was too faint,

taunting us probably,

a cover for their frustration.

It moved.

I almost gasped,

my head at bird speed to look back at the passage,

waiting to see whatever might be out there,

crawling in.

Embarrassingly,

the intricate oil paintings of ghouls

and werewolves from our gaming materials

flashed through my mind,

and I backed further against Misty away from it.

But there was nothing there.

Then I felt Misty's hand on my jaw,

pushing my chin up,

up to the sky.

The thing, or the lack of anything in the sky,

it had shifted.

Before,

it was to the left of my vision.

Now, it was to the right,

more on Misty's side.

I started to say something.

I guess it's just a cloud,

before Misty interrupted.

It's not a cloud.

But it had to be, I thought.

It couldn't be anything else, could it?

The question was answered the moment

that I saw it move.

I watched that absence,

the loose oval shape,

pulling what little light there was

in the darkness away from us,

shifting around above us.

That feathery taste that was growing stronger now,

a frozen place.

Because when it shifted,

I realized something that shattered my whole view

of what we've been experiencing that night.

This wasn't something far above us in the sky,

or up in space.

My realization was

that it was down here,

with us.

And it was making that clicking sound.

That click, click, click,

because it moved over the opening above us,

even though there was nothing to walk on.

Like a spider walking on the underside of the air,

above our heads.

I felt Misty joked next to me,

like she'd been electrocuted.

Then, she was out of reach,

scrambling into the opening.

No, no, no.

I called out to her to wait,

as her shoes passed out of sight.

I jumped to the ground in a panic of my own,

and wiggled through the passage.

This earned me a slash under my right eye

from a branch that I only noticed later on.

Misty was up ahead of me when I made it out,

still on my hands and knees.

She stood, her body twisted,

so that she could look back at our hiding place,

while her legs still face toward the house ready to run.

I watched her expression change from terror to something else.

An unwelcome expression I'd never seen before or since,

but it was on Misty's face.

Even in the terror of that moment,

a face I'd never known that I needed.

We stood there for a moment,

both frozen in a kind of awe.

Her frozen at what was behind me,

and me looking at her.

Then, she was gone,

bolted to the house,

and the crisscrossing beams of those familiar seekers.

I didn't waste time,

and so I was right behind her without looking back myself.

I was afraid to look, I'll admit that.

She saw enough for the both of us.

I was sure of it.

I'd made it about halfway to the house,

when I got hit in the side hard enough to knock me to the ground.

I screamed.

When I looked up, Rob was standing over me.

His flashlight illuminating a smug grin.

Found ya, he said.

I never talked to Misty again after that night.

She posted up between her brother and the wall

while we were all watching a movie.

Neither of us said a word about what we saw.

Later, I couldn't fall asleep until early morning.

When I did, I slept hard.

And Misty and her brother were already gone by the time I woke up.

And then, life happened.

I was in high school and I didn't spend much of my time at Wayne's anymore.

And Misty was never there at the same time that I was.

And I was too shy to do anything more than ask if her brother was going to come over.

Part of me wished that I could ask her what she saw.

And another, bigger part of me,

would have been satisfied never talking or thinking about it again.

And for a long time, that's just how it was.

Whatever we saw that night didn't preoccupy me.

Not in the long term.

I had plenty else on my mind as I slog through high school,

which did turn out to be better than junior high.

By the time I was a sophomore,

the experience Misty and I had had already passed out a daily and even weekly thought.

But, it did resurface.

It happened when I woke up with sweat-soaked sheets after a dream of plunging into darkness.

And sleep paralysis.

I only had that happen a few times, but when I did,

I found myself thinking back to that darkness above Misty and I that night.

Even when I hallucinated a figure in the room,

or the buzzing sound people hear,

I think there was an extra layer of dread for me

that the shape would be back.

That I'd see it and hear it clicking across the air over my head

while I lay there unable to move.

That absence.

Well, shadow people are no big deal next to that.

But I don't want to overstate it either.

What I'm trying to get at is throughout most of my life,

it was just an odd experience,

and it would briefly trouble me from time to time.

But I wasn't traumatized or living in fear.

But this was all before Uncle Wayne's celebration alive.

About 15 years after I stopped spending those summers at his house,

Uncle Wayne went missing.

He went out to hunt early on an October morning,

and he never came back.

Poor ant rage.

He usually hunted on his own land,

but this was one of those times when he ventured out into state land,

a big stretch near Waterloo.

After he went missing, they waited a few years before they had his celebration alive.

She and the cousins hadn't been ready to do it until then,

and even then I'm not sure they were ready.

But the whole extended family had a way of talking about him,

like he belonged to the past without coming out and saying that he was dead.

So, everyone knew.

The cousins and I had grown apart by then.

We'd spread out across Michigan and Ohio,

and Stephen ended up in Wyoming,

and with Wayne gone,

there wasn't so much to bring us back together, I guess,

until that night,

until our toast to his life,

and our loss.

The cousins had planted their own new tentative roots.

Not one of them was under six foot two,

and Richie, or Rich, as he went by now, shook my hand.

His hand enveloped mine in the cramped kitchen.

Now, he was an absolute giant.

Robin Steve had kids,

all of them were doing well materially speaking at least.

The place was packed with family and well-wishers.

I could see my parents off to one side,

talking and nodding politely to some vaguely familiar woman

that I assumed must have been a distant relation

I'd once met when I was like five or something.

My dad's face betrayed no emotion in the wake

of his brother's disappearance.

Rich was seated on what I swore was that same sofa

that us kids lounged on that last summer night,

with the crowd of graying relatives encircling her.

Suddenly, I felt him dead.

I cracked open the door to the walk out basement,

concrete with brick-red supporting beams

dividing the ceiling.

Cool and dark.

Off to the far left was Wayne's crafting table and painting area.

To the right was the door to outside,

which would open out to the back of the property.

The two places where we spent so much of our time.

Wayne's painting station heard to look at.

Maybe even more than it did to first learn that he was missing,

especially given the thought at the time

that he might still turn out and be okay.

I'd written a bit about his hobby work and my tribute to him.

It was pinned up to the foam board display upstairs.

The same white foam board that we used to use

as bases for our little fantasy army units.

He was good.

At some point, I think I became more of a technically proficient painter,

more skilled and exacting in my shading of the miniatures.

But Wayne had such a great sense of color,

and it somehow made the highlights in the shadows

create bigger impressions that my more painstaking work ever did.

It just popped.

Amrach had left things just the way that he had.

I looked over the incomplete collection of half-painted nights.

One of them in a small vise that he used to use to hold the miniature steady.

I turned around, looking to the back door.

I could see sunlight passing through the gaps in the blind over the small window.

I walked over and looked through to the fields

that held such treasured memories and conflicting feelings.

Opened in the door, letting a waft of fresh air carried on a gentle breeze.

As idyllic as I remembered it out there.

When I stepped out, I saw the wood pile off to the left,

up toward the driveway.

Different wood, but it was the same pile.

The same one I hid in so many years ago.

Like the cells in my body, it had been worked away

and simultaneously replaced.

Straight ahead was most of the land,

with those same sorts of narrow paths running through the grass.

It looked almost golden, like wheat, in the bright August sunlight.

I could hear the guests on the back deck above me chatting away.

Named to get away, I headed down one of those paths.

It felt smaller and more constricted.

Less filled with possibility than it used to back then.

I thought about Misty.

She and her family weren't making an appearance as far as I could tell.

Strange, because my impression was that Wayne and her dad had been pretty close.

But I thought back to that night, and how I felt,

how hopeful, alive, and how afraid I was.

I can say with confidence that I've never felt anything like that again,

and with only slightly less confidence.

I can say that I've been chasing after that feeling the rest of my life,

something that's both a dream and a nightmare.

Following that path, as it curved first,

where the cops had trees off to the left,

before it veered back to the right,

in the direction where Misty and I hid,

my feet were crunching through that scorched grass,

when I was struck by another memory.

The grass on either side, still chest high,

made me think of the wall formed by trees on either side of the road,

like an echo of an English head row, toward the pond,

about a mile away where my cousins and I sometimes fished,

where we rode our bikes down the gravel road,

snacks in the baskets on the front of those bikes.

I remember Richie smiling as he held up a little bluegill.

There was a sense of freedom that,

night with Misty was reminding me of,

venturing into the unknown,

in some slight, limited way,

and then pulling at it,

heading down a path with thoughts about finding a place

that no one else knows about, or ever would.

Hell, I was still doing it now decades later.

I kept my eyes toward the ground,

not wanting to break the illusion by seeing the house up there,

people watching me.

A round that had been,

and I could see the place where Misty and I hid,

it was still there,

and it still looked roughly the same.

It was a cluster of bushes,

with some scattered trees and shrubbery dot in its perimeter.

It was clear in the daylight,

the central core of it was inscrutable.

It looked like a tree had once been cut down,

about seven feet above the ground,

instead of an ordinary stump height.

It was mostly concealed by choking vines,

and a tangle of low-level vegetation around it.

Truly, it wasn't that unusual looking,

but somehow it seemed like a bigger and taller structure

than it did when I was a kid,

even though I was bigger now than I was back then.

I stopped, not like in the way it made me feel,

the way looking at it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

I looked back toward the house.

The back deck and the basement door would be out of sight,

the moment I stepped closer to the hiding place.

But I did.

As I approached, I thought back to what I saw with Misty.

The way the sky looked like part of it had been painted over,

with the blackest paint you could get, layers thick.

I walked halfway around the perimeter,

looking for the place that we crawled into the interior,

an absurd thought hit me like shrapnel.

What if Wayne actually didn't go to that state land to hunt?

I knew that was impossible.

They found his car deep on a trail.

But somehow, some way,

it just felt reasonable as I stood there in that moment.

A froze as an electrical click pop sounded behind me.

Was it the same that I'd heard before?

I couldn't be sure.

Even the most impactful memories have ways of changing

in our minds every time, don't they?

But everything I was thinking about Wayne,

about me and Misty in that spot,

it all felt connected.

I know it might seem like I'm connecting dots that aren't there,

but I don't know how else to put it.

What I felt even more powerfully

was that I shouldn't turn around.

Not yet.

I needed to get closer to that hiding place.

I didn't know if I'd be able to get inside anymore,

but I needed to at least be able to touch the structure.

I walked closer.

I winced when I heard that click again, but I kept going.

I reached the structure and I placed my hand on the surface.

It was interwoven vines,

and I stood there for a moment before I turned around.

There was a funny taste in the air.

I could see them flickering through the tall grass,

dotting the field,

some near me and some toward the back of the property,

between the blades,

cones of darkness moving in the broad daylight,

back and forth,

like they were looking for someone.

I thought about the sanctuary that I felt

inside that structure with Misty.

It was like a time capsule of longing,

of possibility.

And I thought about how quickly that became closed off,

and how we fled,

and the expression on Misty's face

when she looked back over my shoulder to where we'd been.

Could there be anything left now?

Two of the beams were approaching,

sucking the summer radiance from the air as they went.

There was that click again.

One of them disappeared.

Another click,

and it reappeared,

closer now.

Feeling my hand on the structure,

I turned and looked at it again.

There was no way to get back inside,

but I knew Uncle Wayne's place.

I knew how to hide there.

I climbed on,

ignoring the sharp prods of twigs as I did.

A few feet up,

the shape fit me well,

well enough that I could sprawl out onto it,

face in the field.

The beams, those dark beams,

continued floating up through the grass,

up and down the paths in between.

I watched while they tried to find me.

Try and find me, I thought.

I know this land.

They wouldn't.

Afterward, I got a letter from Misty.

It went like this.

Dear Terry,

I'm sorry I wasn't at the funeral.

We both know what it really was.

I heard you had an episode there,

that they found you in some corner of the property,

climbing onto the bushes.

I say some corner,

but I know where you were.

Just like I knew,

that same day,

that if I drove out there,

I'd find you.

Because I remember Terry,

I still think about it.

Did you know I never went back to Wayne's house?

Not once.

We used to visit a lot.

My dad and Wayne grew up together.

But I found ways to get out of it after that night.

I even faked being sick once.

They weren't suspicious,

but I dreaded one of my parents asking me why I wouldn't go.

If something had happened to me there,

I imagined all kinds of conversations like that.

Because something did happen, right?

If you're wondering what life's been like for me,

I don't have much of one.

I exist.

I moved in with my mom a couple years back.

I don't think you ever met her.

She and my dad were separated.

She's got COPD,

Meneer's disease,

and she doesn't take care of herself.

That's a bad combo.

So she takes up a lot of my time.

I don't see my dad much or anyone else really.

I hoped that life's been better for you.

I saw a news article a few months ago,

about something called Old Smoker Stars.

It made me think of when we played hide and seek.

And I tried to tell myself,

just based on the headline,

that it could explain in some way what we saw.

But I knew it couldn't.

It couldn't even explain what we saw before we left the hiding place.

Because it was so much closer than a star wasn't it.

And it was moving.

It was there the whole time.

I know it was.

The whole time we were sitting and talking and hiding,

whatever it was, knew we were right there.

And I think it was right there with us.

You know what's weird?

What I find myself most afraid of lately.

It's not seeing it again.

It's not something happening.

It's that nothing is going to happen

that I'm going to remember for the rest of my life.

Because I still remember being in there.

Seeing the fading away of the light,

hearing the sounds like it was tapping on the glass over our heads.

But if it was like glass above us,

I think whatever we saw was on the same side we were.

I remember knowing I had to leave.

It felt so urgent,

this feeling to get out right then.

That's when I crawled out,

as fast as I could.

It wasn't like I needed to get help,

but that I needed to get out in the open,

like we were going to be trapped in there.

Once I got out,

when I turned around and looked back,

I couldn't do anything but run.

And I don't think I could have talked about it.

Not that night and maybe not for years.

Even though I think you saw it too.

You saw it too, right?

Both of us were outside the hiding place by then.

But I could see into it.

I could see into it,

and I could see us in there at the same time.

It was us,

and not just us, but my family,

weighing and raging your cousins,

a bunch of people from my school,

and people I didn't even know,

all lined up in rows.

More people than could fit in there.

But somehow, they did.

Like a picture being projected in 3D.

All of us face in the camera,

and it was like we were broken apart.

It was like something had taken a picture of us

and ripped the film negative,

put it back together,

and then put a bunch of Photoshop filters on it.

Even in the dark,

tell the colors were all wrong,

and it was like there was something translucent

covering the whole thing,

like a sheet,

with all of us frozen in place on the other side.

We were outside,

but we were in there too.

I don't even know if I'm describing it right.

But is that like what you saw?

I always wondered if you saw the same people.

Is that why you went back there?

Were you trying to see it again?

I skimmed a bit further

before I put Misty's letter down.

Big deep breaths.

I was feeling that fatigue again,

and I knew I had to take care

about what I let myself dwell on,

as best I could at least.

To answer one of the many questions that she posed,

no, I didn't see what she described.

I didn't look at anything but her face,

with its expression that,

even then, I must have known meant

some questions which just tolerate no answers.

I don't have it in me to look back

at our hide and seek not again.

I can't do it to myself.

To get back to Wayne's celebration,

I lost time that day.

That is at some point I climbed up

and time that I don't remember spending

my hours before anyone noticed my absence

enough to get worried.

I was out of view of the house,

except for the window from Wayne and Rachel's room,

which was presumably unoccupied.

So I'm not sure how long I was out there.

Whatever was happening to me

exhausted me to such a degree

that I was more or less catatonic.

So I don't know when it was

when my big cousins,

who found me easily this time,

Rob carefully unpicked my clothes from the twigs.

They kept getting caught on them.

They told me I was inconsolable

that I was babbling.

I don't remember that.

I guess I blocked that part out.

They took me to the emergency room,

$800 out of pocket,

and I got checked out.

Nothing unusual turned up.

Like Misty said in her letter,

they called it an episode.

It was suggested that I see a therapist,

but I didn't.

What would I even say?

Here's what I do remember.

While they were pulling me down,

my shouting cousins no doubt framed

by a small crowd filtering over from the house.

I was looking straight down through a gap.

I didn't feel capable of moving,

but even though it was out of my reach

with my last burst of energy,

I tried to shoot my arm through

and grab whatever it is I saw down there.

Wayne's last half-painted night.

I hadn't seen it back at the house.

Blue and silver and primer.

It was the champion.

The miniature mounted on a nearly out of sight war horse,

holding its sort of loft

as though it was attempting to rise

from the ground that it must have been

which passing rainfall.

It's every crevice that might one day

have been expertly shaded.

Instead, it was filled with years

where the slowly accumulating rich Michigan soil,

my futile hand above,

grasping nothing but air.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of 13.

If you like what you heard,

stop what you're doing

and leave a five-star rating and review

wherever you listen to podcasts.

This has been Hide and Seek,

written by Patrick Harald,

narrated by Ian Eperson.

Misty was Bridget Freeman,

music composed by Kayla Britchie,

editing and sound design by Brooke Jeanette.

Our producer-level patrons are Tattooed Fox,

Jessica Yara-Millow,

Riannon, Shawn Geary,

Anthony Diaz, Amy Harper, Jackie K,

Shantelle Payne, Jake R,

Dustin Lark Brown, Adeline,

Jennifer Gatlin, V,

and DogMom DVM.

Thank you guys so much for your support.

Click the link in the show notes

to learn more about joining us on Patreon.

And check us out on social media.

You can find us most places under pod 13

and you can join the Facebook group

for 13 podcast.

Just look for the logo

and you'll find links in the show notes.

Need some 13 swag?

Go to Imaginary.Click Slash Merch

or click the link in the show notes.

If you'd like to submit a story to be performed on the show

or if you'd like to contact us about anything else,

get in touch at info at 13podcast.com.

You'll find submission guidelines

and other info on our website,

13podcast.com

and you can find that in the show notes too.

Bridget Freeman is hiding right behind you.

Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.

Now receiving frequency transmission.

How do we know what's real?

There's so many things that are unknown

in this universe that I'm thankful

I don't know the answers to.

In many ways I feel like the unknown is a gift

that allows us to imagine what could be

and sometimes imagining what could be

is actually greater than steering right at what is.

Our brains try so hard to manufacture certainty

and in our attempts to manufacture certainty

I think we get stuck

and that causes us often to ignore

what is real for one person

which may be completely unreal for someone else.

So how do we know what's real?

We don't.

Not knowing what is real

allows us to peer more deeply into what could be

and that is a gift in and of itself.

Transmission complete.

Stay tuned to Spectrivision Radio.

Stay.

Stay.