A rowboat

You're young, maybe five or six years old, and sitting under a tilted rowboat with two older boys. The boat belongs to your neighbors, the Fishers, and it's leaning against the side of the Fishers' brown two-story, which is next to yours in your particular suburb.

(The Fishers are an older couple. In their basement, Mrs. Fisher has one of those old fat-burning machines with the jiggly strap. She shows you how it works. You need to lean back. Mr. Fisher eats orange shebert and once offers to let you lick his spoon. It's weird but you lick it anyway.)

Underneath that boat, your bony ass is planted on a bed of dead pine needles the shade of copper. The boy on your left is one year older than you. His older brother is on your right. They start calling the boat a clubhouse. The boy on your left talks about how you don't have to ever go home again, because this is your home. We'll stay here forever, he's saying to you. They'll never find us.

You stare ahead at the bottom of the metal boat that is the wall of your clubhouse and begin to cry.

The boy on your left seizes on this and tells you, yep, you'll live here until you die. And if you try to leave, we'll kill you.

You cry harder. You imagine what it's like to die. All that nothingness.

Shut up you little shit, the older boy says. He reaches across you with an arm that smells like cigarettes and backhands his brother in the face, so hard that the back of his head conks the stucco part of the Fishers' home, almost like a bell. His lips furl and he starts to cry. He runs, leaving you with the older boy.

It's OK, the older boy tells you, you can leave if you want to. He's looking straight ahead, too.

You want to leave but you don't. He turns to you. Nothing you know of makes you stay. But somehow, you're feeling more and more trapped.

You cry louder and harder. Your stomach sinks with each sob. Its beyond anything you ever felt before. It's as if, right at that exact moment, the world ran out of air.

You never remember coming out.