At first, what we had done didn’t matter. What was left of August trickled through our fingers in the same idle way every summer vacation did. We still gathered haphazardly almost every morning in the park. Only a block or two wide, the park curved and twisted through our neighborhood for maybe two miles before ending at the river. It was easy to find each other there. Someone might bring a basketball and we’d play on the half-court that used to be a tennis court. The pedestrian walkway over Riverside Boulevard was clogged with ivy and we’d climb it like ropes. We’d wander the pathways of the park and pelt each other with empties left by older kids or dirt clods we harvested from the little baseball diamond.
In the afternoons the humidity dulled us and we would retreat to the dingy community swimming pool, hardly larger than some backyard pools. Becky the lifeguard was sixteen, four years older than the oldest of us, a different species. She would drag out a wobbly fan from the storage shed and angle it up toward where she sat above us in her lifeguard chair, limbs splayed. The pool had something tired about it that we didn’t bother to resist, floating idly and burping from vending machine sodas.
We were a rotating cast of kids, a mix of regulars and randoms. Someone wouldn’t show for a week, only to reappear talking about their dad’s new house and the R-rated movies they got to watch there. Or someone would arrive shadowed by a pair of cousins visiting from Modesto or Fresno or Nevada, kicking at the ground and not making eye contact. It was just whoever showed up at the park in the morning, really. So for the first few days it didn’t seem to matter that Hansen wasn’t there anymore. Then September came and it started to feel strange.
We were walking by the soccer field, the morning mist still clinging to its muddy edges, when a dozen or so crows swooped down, black like obsidian. They were spaced out evenly across the field in an almost-geometric pattern, equal distances between each crow, like markers dotting a graveyard. Each bird stayed exactly where it had landed, as if sprouted up from earth rather than descended from sky, their heads pivoting to and fro. We stopped and stared.
“Freaky,” said Mario.
Rashad bent and picked up a rock, but it grew slick in his hand and he lost his nerve and pocketed it.
“Hansen liked crows,” said Duffy. “He said they were the smartest birds.”
“So what?” said Mario and shoved Duffy by the shoulder.
The crows ignored us, their wary eyes on one another.
Before, we had gone about bare of pretense, asking each other any question that came to mind without hesitation. We asked Salish if her older sister worshiped the devil (no), Tommy if he had really eaten dog food on accident (shut up), and Chan if his dad had killed himself with a shotgun (yeah). But what happened with Hansen established a thing we did not talk about, the first entry on a list that in time would grow longer until it tangled our conversations, choking them.
It was late September when we saw the first bottle. School had started and so the park was a more temporary place, somewhere to idle before going home. Dusk was giving way to dark and we were drifting through the playground when Mario spotted it, a brown bottle hanging by gray wire from the No Camping sign. The bottle had no labels and was broad at its base, a jug almost. Inside it, a tall candle hissed orange-brown flame. Mario stopped and pointed at it, but didn’t say anything. His uncharacteristic silence sobered us. The night breeze clanged the bottle into the metal pole of the sign, tolling a long quavering note that chased us home though we couldn’t say why.
The next week we saw another bottle, a green one hanging by wire from the monkey bars, and more after that, always at dusk with a single lit candle, different bottles in different places, always gone the next time we passed by. We looked for them while pretending we didn’t care, camouflaging our search with loud talk about stupid things. Somehow we connected the bottle candles with Hansen, though we didn’t think he was responsible for them. Instead, we suspected that what we had done to him had invited something bad into the park, and the bottle candles were a sign that the invitation had been accepted.
We started spending less time at the park, arriving home while sunlight was still on offer and confusing our parents. We paid more attention to who showed up in the park and who didn’t. Absences now felt like defections, lessening our numbers and making us vulnerable in a way that tightened our stomachs when we thought about Hansen.
The morning it happened, we had been kicking a pair of soccer balls around the brown outfield of the baseball diamond, the August heat not yet malign. We were imagining the soccer balls as bombs that would explode when they collided with each other, our voices providing the sound effects. At one such collision, Hansen yelled in Mario’s ear, more or less by accident. Mario cupped his hand to his head, swearing, then grabbed Hansen’s ear and twisted. Hansen gave a whimpering yowl and fell to the ground.
That should have been the end of it, and it would have been before. Nothing about Hansen stood out, nothing marked him as any more vulnerable than the rest of us. But the sound he made had a certain pathetic vibration that resonated in a merciless tissue inside each of us, a fold of tissue just then forming, incipient, something none of us had yet realized we possessed. That sound he made and the way his limbs folded as he collapsed—like a fawn standing for the first time, but in reverse—made that tissue in us throb and we chased him all the way to the river.
At the river, one way it happened was that we tumbled down the steep bank, our momentum carrying us into the shallow water where black gnats hung like clouds of smoke and, breathing them in, we sputtered and spat them out. Another way it happened was that we shoved Hansen under the brown water, holding him there until nearly drowned, then spat on him, each in turn. Both ways, other ways, any ways, Hansen never came back.
The rest of us still met up in the park as fall chilled into winter, but less often. We knew about our merciless tissue now, sensed how it was fed and fostered by what happened with Hansen, and it made us wary of each other. If we saw a bottle with a candle, it no longer felt like a threat but like something we had done. The crows didn’t come back to the soccer field, but if they had, if they had again landed in their silent scattered formation, we would have understood that too.
David DeGusta is a writer who also translates from Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia. He is currently an MFA student in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His writing has appeared in Boulevard and Catapult, among other places, and more information is available at his website. Twitter: @davidwrites1. Instagram: @davidwrites1.
Photo by Micael Widell on Pexels.