What Comes Back
Sometimes they never leave
The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. I was twelve years old that year, in 1972, the year Nixon went to China and his buddies broke into the Watergate hotel. Billie Jean King beat Bobbie Riggs at tennis, and I dreamed that even an East Texas girl could grow up to be an astronaut.
“Look there!” My cousin, Ray Kinder, elbowed me in the ribs. Ray, a year older than me and a foot taller, swung our gig pole in the light’s direction, a hundred yards in front of us.
“Hush. I see it.” I swatted away the sharp, forked tines on the end of the pole as Ray turned back to me. We’d been out gigging frogs, an operation best done in darkness. A chorus of deep croaks and high trills sounded from the creek–the bullfrogs waiting for us to sneak up and blind them with our flashlights before we stabbed them. Moonlight filtered through the pines and colored everything around us in shades of blue and gray. In contrast, the single flame in the cabin window glowed golden orange.
Brush and tree limbs covered most of the view and concealed the weathered wood of its walls, but I’d visited that cabin in the daytime and knew the shape of the sagging porch. I’d never gotten closer than that stoop, though, and that was on a dare from Ray. Folks called it the Bonner…
