"I still have your key."
She turned sharply on her heels and glared at me. "Really?" she cried, "why didn't you say so earlier?" Even ten years later, her eyes lit up just like when we were in middle school together. She really hadn't changed at all.
I nodded, a vaguely familiar tingling feeling rising up the back of my neck. It was the perpetual excitement that I had every time I spent time with Jo. She had been the school tomboy, Ms. Joanne Phelps, to our catholic schoolmarms but woe on anyone who dared call her that outside of classes. It was always Jo, always has been and apparently, looking at her walking in those rolled up jeans and grease stained T-shirt, always will be.
We had been best friends since 4th grade, when she'd found my hiding spot back behind the school barn and declared it her new palace. She had been the one to find the buried "dinosaur bone" when we were adventurers in the Sahara, the one that fought off the shadow Indians as they tried to take her throne, and the first to try out the "wings" we'd made of pine board and chicken feathers from Momma's kitchen. That had resulted in twenty horsehair stitches which she proudly wore around school for a month. During that time, we were soldiers fighting a bitter war of freedom for our tiny kingdom.
Over the summers, I spent the days at her house. She lived in the old ranch at the end of road. Her momma had taken to drink after her dad died and it was really just Jo and a couple of ranch hands who kept the farm running and the cattle fed. We built a veritable treasure trove of memories up in the back attic. She had this big metal cookie tin that we filled with our stories and drawings. She was a very good artist, drawing vivid sketches of the monsters we fought and the various roles we played and pages of maps detailing the expanse of land we ruled. That attic was in many ways the culmination of all that we did as kids. We'd called it the Cave of Immense Secrets and we swore on our word as spies to swallow the plans to its location even under extreme torture.
It was the key to her house that Jo was pulling off my keychain right now. She had given it to me so I could sneak in the back and tiptoe up the stairs without facing the drunk anger of Mrs. Phelps. I'd always kept it a secret from Momma; it went with me, tucked in my sock, when we moved to Kansas and was the first key I put on my keychain at college. "Meet me on the steps of CIS, at midnight," she declared, using the acronym we'd developed to keep the cave a secret. Her eyes were twinkling again.
And so thus, I found myself on her dust-covered front porch and it's boarded up windows, no different, now, from every house in town. That tingle was rising up the back of my spine. Something howled in the distance and I shuddered involuntarily, scanning the dark street for Jo.
Her momma had passed on shortly after our move. At the insistence of community, Jo was supported into a boarding school on the money from selling the cattle. The ranch was never sold: a dilapidated building on the outskirts of town wasn't in much demand, especially since all the jobs were moving to the big city. Jo had suffered through the rest of her education, escaping as soon as she turned eighteen and becoming a truck mechanic in the city. She'd been the one to track me down, fresh out of business school, and at her insistence, I'd driven down to meet her for the weekend.
Jo interrupted my reverie by shining her flashlight straight into my face. I hadn't even heard her truck pull up. She laughed at my jolt and pulled me to my feet. In seconds, I was looking out through the broken attic window at the blackness of dry Midwestern grassland. Jo was busy scanning the floorboards for the loose one under which we kept our box.
"Found it!" she cried, lifting out her prize and laying out its contents on the dusty attic floor. The pages had yellowed but the memories and the adventures were still there. Soon we were lost in the past, laughing and joking -- children again.
At some point during the night, Jo disappeared. I was too engrossed to follow, knowing full well that she'd get me when she needed a second person for our games. Even when her screams lashed through the darkness, I simply smiled, finished the paragraph I was reading and got to my feet. Jo had found the "monster" she was hunting and was probably doing a pretty decent job attacking it with whatever she had found handy. Only when I heard the inhuman growling did I start running.
Out in the dusty street of the deserted town, my worst fears were confirmed. Jo's body lay collapsed, her broken neck leaking blood into the parched earth. The last monster she ever fought was real. Later on, they determined it was a coyote.
==========
Much thanks to Mark Gebhard for these lines.
Currently grooving to: Tracy Byrd - Drinkin' Bone