And that was the first time I heard about little Mary Clarke who was strung up by her feet with a rope from the tallest tree in the forest and her throat was cut from ear to ear. As he told the story, Mark used his own knife to show me where she was cut. He placed that knife point so tenderly against my neck, just below my ear. The girls shrieked at him to stop, but Mark batted his hand at them, and hushed them, and slowly... so slowly, he showed me how her throat was slit by passing the tip of his wood-handled knife with the snake on the hilt ever so lightly across my throat from ear to ear. As he reached my other ear the pee came out of me, soaking the front of my jeans and running warmly down my legs to puddle in the dirt at my feet.

"Shit, boy, you wet yourself", he remarked with a laugh.

He let me go and I ran while the boys laughed and Tammy chastised him for being so mean.

"Come on," I heard him say, "I had to teach him an important lesson."

Again I hardly realized I had been walking, and now I was at that same clearing in the woods, only I was twelve now, and things had changed. The trees here had long ago obliged by growing away from each other enough to leave a space that would easily fit two small tents, a small fire, and the two fallen trees that were used as benches. I set my flashlight against one of those trees and struck camp for myself, erecting my tent, unrolling my bag, and eventually gathering enough wood for a small fire.

Now that I was settled, and eating a granola bar, I looked up at the trees that creaked and groaned in the wind. Their leaves, by day, would be a riot of reds, yellows, and gold, but by night they were all black as they spun to the forest floor to decompose. I started to imagine the little girl, Mary, swinging from her rope from one of the trees, her dress falling down over her face, exposing her. I imagined her killer lifting that dress out of the way to reach her throat with his knife.

Suddenly I was shaking violently and staring at the dying embers of my modest fire. I had gone to a horrible place in my mind, and I didn't know for how long. Then I realized I was crying, and that something must have brought me out of my half-sleeping nightmare. I held my breath and strained to hear against the wind and the trees. A twig snapped. Leaves crunched. Voices were carried to me by the wind. A girl's voice, and then a boy's voice, and then another, and another, and then I heard a voice I recognized, and I knew they would want their clearing to themselves.

There was no time to pack up the tent, or roll up the sleeping bag. There was no time to douse the last of the smoldering wood in the rock-ringed fire pit. I snatched up my pack, and my flashlight, and I retreated hastily into the trees and bush until I found a place where a fallen tree had created a small hollow over a depression in the ground. If I lay quite still I would be safe, and unseen. As I watched from a distance through the gap in the trees like missing teeth, I saw him enter the clearing like a king with his courtiers behind him. They looked about them in wonder and said what the fuck and wadda ya know, and then they were poking around in my tent. The tent my father gave me for my tenth birthday.