Trail Rides Along Sycamore County

In a pond where the Allyne children had played, there lived a fish shaped like Jesus. Two summer days after the media storm descended and subsequently vanished, the eldest of the small children returned to the soft muddy edge of the mucky pool with barefeet sinking ever so slightly in a gentle way. Cheetos bags, batteries, helicopter echoes and the memory of bad syncopation, camera flash, littered the atmosphere. It was all ruined. He wept fresh crystal tears. They fell one by one, dropping from cheek to chin down into the impure waters for a few surviving tadpoles to consume. His legs were long, hair blonde, and the fish gone. Something he couldn't identify stood still, achingly so, while a sneaky feeling crept through the reeds and slithered away like a sliding snake. The sun was shining in pockets without shade. The bare earth was heating like a cake, trees and setting rustic. Birds made noises tiny and large but beautiful. When the other children caught scent of their brother's return to the water, they ran down their dirty hill, past the swingset and wildly into the creek. Splashing, thrashing, and joining him loudly, unselfconscious, occupied by all those simple and stubborn conflicts that young ones are so capable of creating and forgetting about in instants and in lifetimes. Water was happening in varying directions above that once still plane, and the young hollering voices were propelling his smile with an activity and unabashed chaos and gentle inquiry. Those strange few days which passed were already starting to fade into a remote and distant sliver of the black and white. Those jagged memories competing and losing to everything in the here and now. Then that old bullfrog resembling Ray Charles came out of hiding, croaking music and plopping around as they chased him along the banks, while the boy, recognizing the infinite magic of things, tried clinging to some strand of that awful feeling he had endured, which had no bearing on today, and all likely went away.