The Dark Game

This is an excerpt: the first 875 words of a 4,500 word story I wrote last month called "The Dark Game". It is loosely based on my time living in Ferrum, Virginia (although in the story it is set in southern West Virginia).

* * *

“Don’t worry Simon we’re here together. You’re such a good kitty, kitty.”

We sat on the floor of that new, old, new-to-us house, which Danny rented from the mine company, out in the middle of nowhere mountains, West Virginia. My big brother recently started a job in the mines. Both our parents were dead. He brought me with him and he brought me up. I was only fourteen years old but Danny was twenty. My only companion mostly was the cat. Danny worked too hard and I hated it. But he fed us. So I loved him even though I hated that place, that situation.

“Don’t worry kitty kitty. Where’d you go Simon? Where’d you go?”

On a Friday afternoon I crawled around the floor in my shorts looking for the kitty, wanting to have a friend. I felt a lonely tremor creep to the back of my mouth, come up from my gut. We arrived in summer so I hadn’t been to school. I didn’t have a job of my own, being too young perhaps, but also being new there and not knowing anyone.

Here sat the little coffee table, there the old velvety brown couch, in many places poofs of fur-balls and lint and dust floated. I scooted about on my burning knees, travelled over the hardwood floors. We had kept all of mom and dad’s old furniture so we lived like fogeys although our ages only summed to thirty-four.

I could see him over in the kitchen under a chair sauntering around like looking for a bug or a mouse. He was a little overweight, Simon, with long grey and black fur with some white on his belly. He saw that I was looking at him and he stared at me for a moment with a wise expression and then turned about on his pawpads and scuttled the underchair spot, smoothing over near the back door of the little kitchen, back there where vines from out back pierced through the thin paneling, just jutting out of the walls, and there sat a little table for drying dishes or perhaps laying out laundry.

“Come on back kitty kitty … I love you love you LOVE you kitty kitty.”

And then “RRRRRRRRRRRRRING.”

I heard the doorbell and I heard some giggling come from the porch.

I scrambled up to my knees and stuck my wrist out against the couch and torqued up and I dutifully strolled to the door, although sometimes I wish I’d never answered it.

“Hay!” giggled one of the girls. She was tall, standing hands-on-hips at the other side of the door, and she had one of those 1989 hairdos: a wave of blonde hair that rolled back over itself and said “whooptedooo, hello!” Another girl stood beside her, kind of gaped at me.

“Hi.”

“Ahm Janet. This is Cindy.”

Cindy struck me as more reserved, didn’t say anything, but I thought she was more beautiful. I instantly saw that Cindy had a bigger body than mine: not fat but just bigger. The first one – Janet – was taller but skinnier. Could they be my age, my grade? As a boy I knew even then that you had to graph these things out, size them out.

“I’m Kenny.”

“We live down thar, next door,” said Janet.

Down there. There weren’t hardly any houses down there. We had a cow pasture across the road. An old man lived over to the right: to the right if you’re standing on the front porch and looking at the cows. There was a graveyard on the left and nothing seemed to exist beyond that, just road.

I stepped out on the porch and shut the door behind me to keep the cat from sprinting out, and maybe also to cover up my inner sanctum (of which I was somewhat ashamed). I looked down to the front of my shorts to see if anything was hanging out of my fly. I pressed my palms across the fly. Though nothing was hanging, I felt that they could see everything. I smiled and I blushed and blustered.

“OK, where is your house?” They were pointing “down there” beyond the graveyard.

Janet took my hand and pulled me off the porch and I almost slipped and broke my face but my feet shuffled shuttled kicked and slinked down those steps and my hand felt warm where she was taking it and then she repositioned it on my wrist who knows why.

Cindy just stood where she was and pivoted and I could feel the light beams from her eyes staring down at my ass. I could feel my ass burning from those prickly beams.

Janet and I catapulted caromed through some high grass out front and under the outer reaches of a big maple and she said look down there. I looked down there beyond the graveyard and she said see where the road kind of curves off to the right. Yeah. You see it? I saw it on the left of the curvy road: a little ranch house and you could even see the pinholes of windows at the top of the basement.

“Well come on, come on down and meet my brother Chan and my dad. They’d love to welcome ya.”

I didn’t, I … “well I don’t know I got the cat in there and ahm harum ahh.”

“Come on letz go,” said Cindy, and those were the first real words she had said to me all day. I obeyed them as if she were my mother.

We almost ran down the country road, trucks and other vehicles slamming past us, missing us narrowly. Cindy was my mother but Janet was the drill sergeant who pulsed us on, pump them legs!

“I figgurmy brother’ll be home by seven I gotta be back by then,” I said with no particular opening for it, which must’ve sounded strange to them but I guess my mind was still up in that tall grass in front of the porch thinking of excuses not to go.

They ignored, “Where’d you move from we saw yerr brother’s truck de’udder day, we saw you coming out movin’ stuff.”

“How old’s yerr brother?”

“Cindy thinks he’s cyoot.”

“No I don’t shett up Janet!”

When she said shut up I could tell that Cindy was younger than Janet, not just shorter. She had said shut up and then a rose grew on her face.

“How old are you guys?” I said.

“I’m 16; Cindy’s 14.”

“I’m fourteen too,” I said.

We slowed down a little and then, after knowing I was her same age, though she was still bigger than me, I took a closer look at Cindy. And since she seemed a little shy, and with that rose in her face, I could look at her without expecting the strike of the tongue that had come a little while ago from Janet when I was looking at her hairdo and then looking at how she had freckles below her neck and above where her weird v-neck t-shirt wagged its thumb down toward her perky breasts.

“What is it?” she had said. And then I had said the thing about figgerin’ my brother would be home.

Cindy didn’t wear the same type of t-shirt. She wore what was almost a dress but it had shorts instead of a skirt or whatever. These baggy ruffles surrounded her sleeves and below that her blank white arms hung thinner than you’d imagine, seeing as how they came out parallel to those sizable fourteen-year-old tits. And Cindy had blond hair too but hers was a little darker and her eyebrows were real dark but not so big like my caterpillars. Her face was like a perfect plus sign or the sign of the cross, with big eyes in the top two spaces, a long nose running down the middle and a small mouth hugged by freckles like her sister’s. Cindy’s face didn’t make a circle as some girls’ faces do; it was thinner like a man’s, but she seemed much more sensuous than a man could be even in his thoughts.

I stopped my ogling short when she looked at me and so I darted to look up at the graves beyond.

“You been through therr yet?” Janet interjected.

“No.”

“Want to?”

She turned ninety degrees and scaled the high hill from the road up to the angular side of the yard and I went up after her not thinking about it and Cindy was behind me. Then I slipped on the dark grass and I almost fell into Cindy. But she didn’t touch me at all, and I didn’t touch her. I recaptured my footing and plodded on, right up to the top. I guess I should’ve reached down and given her a hand at that slippery spot. But anyway she was alright.

There in the graveyard we whistled around and I marveled at those girls how they got chattier in there while I got sullen. I saw how the sides of the yard sloped up all the way around and the middle of this little graveyard was like the bottom of a cereal bowl and there sat a single statue in the basin like a water-well for the dead. In effect the basin was sprouting this great marble tree with upraised arms as if Jesus or the Anti-Christ was buried down there just sipping on the corpses’ blood.

Janet whirled around like a three-year-old with a flower in her hand as she fired questions at me, one by one, about my brother and where we’d come from and what we liked to do.

“We just moved from Petersburg, which is like just south of Richmond.”

“Cool,” like she didn’t know where that was and didn’t care.

“Let’s go home an’ play the dark game,” said Cindy.

I asked what that was.

“It’s like hide-n-go seek in the dark. Weel hafta wait til it gets dark.”

“It won’t be dark before seven. I gotta go home an’ make dinner for Danny.”

“What are you, his waff?” Janet said, and I didn’t have the heart or the nerve or the balls to say anything about my dead mother and dad.

“Shut up,” I said.

“Lessgo,” said Janet.

© Kevin White 2008

THE REST OF THE STORY IS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.