In the Gloaming by Alice Elliott Dark

Author:Alice Elliott Dark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner / Marysue Rucci Books
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

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The fields were almost gone; it saddened him to see it. He’d run himself sick in those fields, run until his lungs felt scalded and his legs were so tight he feared the tendons would snap. Now it was one development after the next, expensive faux French houses sprouting incongruously from the old Indian land. As a kid he’d found lots of arrowheads buried in the dirt. He wondered if the construction workers bothered to collect the artifacts that they plowed up or if the children who lived in these sterile houses ever went exploring. Did anyone even think about what had been there once?

It wasn’t all bad news, however. Though much of the land had been ruined, the lay of it was the same, the streets still making for a bumpy ride that reminded him of pioneers being jostled on their buckboard wagons. With the windows down, the sharp clean scents of forsythia and thawing ground lent his flimsy rental car the purity of his old Raleigh three-speed, and he found himself instinctively shifting his weight as he maneuvered along the twisting roads that were known for disorienting even the locals. This is good, he thought—good to remember who he was before women. The radio featured an album side of early Springsteen, and that seemed right, too.

He took the “back way” to Mill Rock Road and felt a pang as he turned the final corner and entered the street. The shade trees had grown, but the curbs were still buried under the detritus of leaves and mock oranges and black walnuts, a natural arsenal perfect for chucking at cars. He noticed the Millers had a red door now and an addition had been built onto the side of Drew Adams’s, except they weren’t the Millers’ or the Adamses’ houses anymore; all the mailboxes declared new names. At the front of every property, large leaf bags sat lined up for collection by the township in compliance with the spate of laws against leaf burning that had overtaken the suburbs since he was a kid. That was too bad, he thought. He’d loved looking out his window at night and seeing a circle of embers shining in the back yard, then lying down on sheets that smelled of cooked leaves. In the afternoons, he’d send the buoyant ashes flying with a stamp of his foot and write his name surreptitiously on the blind side of the garage with the tip of a charred stick. What did kids do now, he wondered. What was childhood without campfires? Somehow or other, he thought, he’d give his own son that experience.

He swallowed repeatedly as he approached the end of the cul-de-sac, site of his family’s house. The night before he’d fantasized about ringing the doorbell and asking to have a look around. He’d even lingered over an image of himself pointing out to the current children the spot in the attic where he’d carved his name in the rafters. What he hadn’t

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