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him and his world began to spin. He felt himself falling…but he wasn’t moving. His insides were merely anticipating the descent he sensed was coming; his mind was readying for the shock of hitting those branches on the way down, followed by the frozen slap of the snow-covered ground.
The world continued to spin and Henry couldn’t stop staring; he was mesmerized by the ground that seemed to be lunging up at him. His center of gravity shifted as the winter wind whipped past his face.
The icy air on his cheeks shook Henry from his daze. He wrapped his arms around the tree trunk and he turned his head. He would fall if he didn’t move. He reached through the trap door, grabbed on to the edge, and started to pull himself to safety. For a moment he thought he wouldn’t have the strength to make it, but then he braced his yellow rain boot against a branch and launched himself through the opening like a champagne cork being popped.
Henry rolled across the floor, closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply while pulling his knees to his chest, rocking himself gently. He knew this wasn’t the Big Boy way to handle the situation, but he couldn’t help himself. He was more scared by the near disaster than he had ever been in his entire life.
He could still feel himself almost falling, and he understood for the first time how easily death could come for anyone, even little boys. He wasn’t sure if he believed in the Heaven and the Hell the preacher at church talked about, and he definitely wasn’t sure where little boys who snuck off into the woods were sent when it came to the afterlife, but he was certain he would rather not learn the answers to those questions anytime soon.
Once his breathing had returned to normal, Henry opened his eyes. The roof of the old structure was partially collapsed and the dark wood of the walls and floor were rotten in places. There were crude windows on three sides and Henry could see he was above the rest of the trees. The gray clouds swirled through the valley, the wispy remains of the unexpected winter storm.
Henry turned to look for the trap door—he didn’t want to fall through when he moved— and that was when he saw the skeleton sitting in the far corner.
And that was when Henry screamed.
The wordless sounds coming from his throat didn’t even sound human to him, much less like any noise he could willfully make—and for a moment he was certain the shriek had come from the skeleton. His scream echoed through the woods.
After a moment, though, Henry stopped. He tried to calm himself the way his mother would if she were here. He had already acted like a baby once today; he was supposed to be a Big Boy. Yes, the skeleton was scary, but it couldn’t hurt him, right? A skeleton was a person who had been dead for a long time, and a dead person was a sad thing, but the dead couldn’t hurt the living. His parents had explained this to him once while dressing him in his Sunday church outfit on a Tuesday morning, the day of his grandmother’s funeral the previous summer.
Now Henry studied the skeleton of a child about his age. The skull was grinning. The skeleton wasn’t as scary as Henry first thought, but what did frighten him was the tattered yellow rain slicker and the boots— they reminded him of what he was wearing.
Henry closed his eyes and took a series of deep breaths. When he opened his eyes again, the skeleton was gone.
The bones hadn’t even existed in the first place, and Henry had no idea what to think now. It was as if one of the games he liked to play in the yard had gotten out of hand—as if the line between his imagination and the real world had blurred and he didn’t even realize it was a game.
Henry stood and approached the corner where the bones had been, careful to avoid the trap door.
There were no bones, but there was a necklace. The silver was tarnished. Henry picked up the chain, tentatively touched the metal Christ hanging from the loop. The metal was cold and he