Disaster's Children by Emma Sloley

Author:Emma Sloley [Sloley, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-04T22:00:00+00:00

The tree house had endured, through storms and decay and years of neglect during which there had been no little children on the ranch to claim it. It had been built in the fork of a spreading old tree in a copse near the stream. The boughs dangled strange pods that cracked open in spring and scattered tiny evil-looking red seeds like confetti. Marlo had been ten years old when the tree house had been built; she and Alex and Ben, already inseparable at that age, had watched in wonder as the house took shape under the ministrations of a gang of parents. It was constructed largely of planks left over from the ranchers’ own homes, so the materials were expensive and hardy, and someone who knew what they were doing had overseen the construction. There were plenty of prosaic reasons to explain why it had endured. Still, it was tempting to imbue it with some sort of childhood magic, because its silhouette was so endearingly wonky-looking, with its crooked peaked roof and temperamental hinged door. It looked less like it had been built than plonked down into the crotch of the tree in a storm. You had to have played in it for years or watched it being meticulously crafted—Marlo remembered blizzards of nails and solemn measuring of planks—to appreciate the integrity of the thing.

“It’s probably full of spiders and bugs,” warned Marlo as they stood at the tree’s base, fingers laced together, staring up at the underside of the house’s floor, but Wolf was completely charmed. He clambered up the ladder and after poking his head inside declared it perfectly intact, apart from a couple of loose boards, but they could easily remedy that.

“Can we sleep out here one night?” he asked, bright-eyed and pleading.

She laughed at his earnest expression. For the first time it was possible to see the boy he had once been.

On the way to one of the sheds to gather materials to fix the house up, Wolf told her about when he was a kid and he’d read about people camping but had never done it.

“I could barely imagine the countryside. We didn’t even go to the beach all that often, and we lived within a thirty-minute drive of the ocean.”

“How come?”

He didn’t seem to hear her.

“I was obsessed with the idea of going camping. Obsessed. I don’t know why, I think I’d seen it in movies, and it just became this exemplar of everything joyous in the world, or something. So one time I borrowed a tent from this friend from school, Mike Carson, yeah, and I pitched it in the backyard of our house, and I camped out that night. I remember I took an insane amount of time to choose provisions from the kitchen. Ham slices, half a loaf of bread, a cold roasted potato, a bit of salt in a twist of foil. I stayed out there with my book and flashlight, and I kind of rationed out the food, like it might run out and I’d starve before morning light.

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