I felt the dirt around the edge of the chasm give way, and I reeled back in an attempt to regain my balance, but it was not enough. I tumbled into the crater. It was only a few feet deep, but it had a fairly large perimeter. I was puzzled. I remembered this place vividly from that night– the topography of this particular area was etched deeply into my mind — but I didn’t remember the hole. I rose to my knees as I tried to wind back my mind’s clock.
That’s when I heard Josh scream.
I rose to my feet quickly and scrambled out of the hole. I tried to see what was happening, but Josh had the flashlight, and its beam moved wildly through the darkness as he flailed frantically on the float. He was panicked, and as the light shot sporadically across his face, I could see it was contorted with fear and desperation.
“What’s wrong, Josh?!” I yelled.
But he didn’t respond with anything more than the same cries that had pulled me out of the hole. He was trying to get up, but each time he would rise up even a little, he would fall immediately back onto the float, and the whole process would begin anew. I wanted to help Josh, but I couldn’t move myself any closer — my legs wouldn’t cooperate. I hated these woods. Josh threw the flashlight to free his hand, and I stared at it, still unable to break my paralysis.
It wasn’t until Josh roared coherently that he needed help that I was able to force myself to move. I ran and grabbed the discarded flashlight; I shined it on my friend, not knowing what to expect. The light washed over his body, and I could see that he was writhing violently, the weathered and worn shark-shaped float distending underneath him. At first, I couldn’t see anything near him that could be causing his panic. I shifted my gaze from the surroundings and back onto Josh and stepped closer. His plight came into view.
Spiders.
There were dozens of them crawling in criss-crossing patterns along his arms and across his torso. There must have been a clutch of them in the float. The closer I got, the more there seemed to be as my eyes became better able to distinguish their small bodies. Josh’s hands repeatedly returned to his face to wipe it clean of any spiders that might make the journey up there. His frightened and rapid movements stood once again in stark contrast to my resumed static state. Josh was not really afraid of spiders, at least not by the thought or sight of them, but I was. I stood there and wished that Josh had been plagued by something else — anything else. But I had to do something for him; he would have done something for me.
Setting the flashlight on the ground, I ran to my friend and shut all thoughts of the spiders out of my mind — if I thought about them, I would stop thinking about helping Josh. I grabbed his arms and leveraged back, pulling him up as steadily and strongly as I could. Once on his feet, he yanked off his shirt and began savagely beating it against the ground while I tried to brush the remaining spiders from his arms and neck.
When the urgency had passed, we stood there for a moment surveying one another and ourselves; picking and brushing the odd spider off the other, and occasionally slapping our hands against our own bodies in response to some tickling rogue hair or leaf. From a distance, we must have looked like two monkeys with neurological disorders. When the danger seemed to have passed and the spasms stopped, I bent down, picked up Josh’s shirt, and handed it to him. He snatched it out of my hands and shook it violently in case there were any stowaway arachnids, and after he pulled it over his head and slid his arms through, he leaned forward and said with the kind of tone you might hear in someone’s voice as they were punctuating a great argument with a final point, “Fuck spiders.”
We walked on.
I had my bearings back, and Josh knew that we were in my part of the woods, so he dropped back a little and I took the lead. We were getting closer to my house now, so we became more focused on what had brought us into the woods in the first place.
Boxes was my cat, but Josh had known him for almost as long as I had — so long, in fact, that Josh had his own set of stories about my cat. When we were in first grade, Josh was staying at my house for the night and was sleeping on the bottom bunk. At some point while he slept, Boxes climbed in bed with him and was still there when he woke up the next morning. Josh told me that when he opened his eyes Boxes was laying about a foot away from his face and was staring right at him. Josh said, or at least implied, that for a moment he felt like they were sharing something special — that they were making some kind of a connection. This moment lasted right up until Josh smiled and Boxes smacked him in the face with his clawless paws, quickly and repeatedly, just before he dashed out of the room, leaving Josh dazed. Of course, I didn’t witness any of this, but I was somewhat privy to the conclusion since Josh’s shouts were what woke me up that morning.
That night, as we walked through the woods, drawing ever closer to my old house, we took turns telling different parts of that story to one another.
We continued on our path, but as we passed the pile of dead Christmas trees, its weathered ornaments still healthy enough to catch the faintest light and cast it away, what Josh had said earlier in our journey still tugged at my thoughts. I confronted him abruptly.
“Why’d you say what you said back there?”
“What? About Boxes biting me on the nose? I swear he did!”
“No. Not that. You asked how far we could go into the woods. Why’d you ask that?”
“Huh? Oh. I dunno. I thought it’d be funny.”
“Yeah, but where’d you hear that question? Why would you ask me that?” I was trying not to let on that it had upset me.
“It’s that riddle. You told me that stupid riddle in kindergarten.”
“What? I don’t remember that.”
“C’mon. Are you serious? It was the day we let our balloons go. I guess you finished your work, or — yeah that’s right, because it was before your paper got all messed up — you came up to me when I was finishing mine, and we started talking about how we’d explore the woods at your house and stuff. And then you asked me how far I could go into the woods, but I didn’t know what you meant, and when I tried to answer you, you just kept asking that stupid question over and over.”
“Oh yeah!”
Josh started laughing. “And then you said I’d just have to figure it out, and you tried to be all mysterious. But then you just blurted the answer out like ten seconds later!”
“Oh yeah…”
“No wonder you forgot! Who’d want to remember blowing a joke so bad!”
He punched me lightly in the arm, and I shoved him back playfully. We laughed as we walked through The Ditch.
We were back in my old neighborhood, and suddenly the task at hand seemed much more daunting. It was probably about one o’clock in the morning; most of the houses were dark inside, and there were no streetlights in this part of my old neighborhood, so our flashlight cut sharply through the darkness, and we saw only what the beam hit. I started to wonder how we were going to find Boxes in such blackness. I found myself wishing we had another flashlight.
The last time I had rounded the bend that was ahead of us, I had seen my house fully illuminated, and there was a part of me that expected to find it in the same state as Josh and I pressed forward and the roof of my house appeared over the others. All the memories of what transpired that night came flooding back. In the woods, I had been hit with waves of flashes from the past from that winter night when I was six, and they would break and retreat back into the reservoir of my mind. But as I retraced my path on the paved road back to my house, for a moment, Josh seemed to fade away, and every step seemed to hurt as if my feet had once again been cut open by the sharp sticks and thorny bushes of the woods’ undergrowth. Although I was wearing shoes this time, I could almost feel the small asphalt pebbles that had wedged themselves into the cuts on the soles of my feet the last time I made this journey.