The Water Tasted Like Iron, But We Drank It Because It Tasted Like Freedom.

Part 1

My name is Jack. I’m sitting on my front porch in Ohio, staring at a street that is deafeningly quiet. There are three kids across the road, sitting on a bench, heads bent down, faces glowing blue from the screens in their hands. They haven’t spoken a word to each other in twenty minutes.

I look down at my own hands. They’re shaking. I just got back from the cemetery. We put Tommy in the ground today. Fifty years old. Gone. Just like that.

Seeing those kids over there… it breaks something inside me. They will never understand what Tommy and I had. We didn’t have iPads. We had outside.

I close my eyes and I’m ten years old again. It’s August. The heat is shimmering off the asphalt. We didn’t have GPS; we had to remember the way home. I remember the panic and the thrill of biking three towns over, knowing that if we got lost, we were truly lost. There was no safety net. No “Find My iPhone.” Just me and Tommy, figuring it out, relying on landmarks and gut instinct.

If I wanted to see him, I couldn’t just send a lazy text. We didn’t have text messages; we knocked on our friend’s door to see if they could play. I can still hear the sound of my knuckles on his screen door. Rap-rap-rap. The anxiety of waiting to see if his dad would answer, or if Tommy would come bursting out with his bike helmet already on. That face-to-face connection… it meant everything. It took effort. Friendship took effort back then.

We ran until our lungs burned. We were feral. We were dehydrated and happy. We didn’t drink bottled water; we drank from the garden hose, and it tasted like freedom. I can taste it right now—the metallic tang of the rubber, the cold shock of the water hitting the back of my throat. We’d take turns, gasping for air, water dripping down our chins, laughing at absolutely nothing.

The rule was simple, unspoken law. We came home when the streetlights turned on. That buzz of the amber lights flickering to life was the only clock we needed. It signaled the end of the adventure, the safe return to the harbor.

But tonight, the streetlights are on, and Tommy isn’t coming home.

I look at the scars on my shins. We scraped our knees, climbed trees, and built forts. Every scar has a story. Every scar was a badge of honor we earned together. Now, the neighborhood is sterile. Safe. Quiet. We didn’t have much, but we had everything. And sitting here tonight, realizing I can never knock on his door again, I feel like I have nothing left.

Type “YES” if you remember the taste of hose water! 💦🙌

Part 2: The Fort in the Woods

The wooden slats of the porch swing groaned beneath me, a low, rhythmic creak that sounded like an old man clearing his throat. It was the only sound I made. For a long time, I just sat there, my hands gripping the edge of the seat until my knuckles turned the color of bone. The funeral program was still in my pocket, folded into a sharp, jagged square that dug into my thigh. Thomas “Tommy” O’Connell. 1974–2024.

I couldn’t stay on the porch. The silence of the modern suburbs was suffocating me. It wasn’t a peaceful silence; it was a heavy, electronic silence. It was the sound of a thousand Wi-Fi signals humming through the air and zero human voices. The kids across the street had finally moved, but only to retreat inside their air-conditioned fortress, likely to plug themselves into a gaming console where they would talk to strangers in other countries instead of the neighbor next door.

I stood up. My knees popped—a reminder that I was forty-nine, not nine. I needed to walk. I didn’t have a destination in mind, or at least, I didn’t think I did. But my feet knew. They remembered the geography of this town better than my brain did. My feet were programmed with the coordinates of 1984.

I walked down my driveway, past my leased SUV that I barely drove, and stepped onto the asphalt. It was warm, radiating the day’s heat back up through the soles of my dress shoes. I loosened my tie, pulling the silk knot down until I could breathe, and unbuttoned the top collar of my stiff white shirt. I felt like an imposter in these clothes. Tommy would have laughed at me. He would have called me a “suit.”

I started walking toward the end of the cul-de-sac. This neighborhood, “Oak Creek Estates,” hadn’t been here when we were kids. Back then, this was all just “The Field.” It was a sprawling, unkempt expanse of tall goldenrod, thistle, and Queen Anne’s lace that grew high enough to hide a boy on a bike. Now, it was manicured lawns, HOA-approved mailboxes, and security cameras blinking red eyes from every porch.

As I walked, the overlay of the past began to flicker over the present.

I looked at the perfectly edged lawn of the house on the corner. In my mind, the green grass vanished. I saw a dirt jump. I saw a mound of earth we had shoveled together for three days straight, sweating through our t-shirts, just to get two seconds of airtime.

I closed my eyes for a second, walking by memory.

“Pedal, Jack! Pedal harder!”

I could hear his voice. Not the deep, gravelly voice of the man who had died of a heart attack three days ago. But the high-pitched, cracking voice of the ten-year-old boy who thought he was invincible.

I remembered the bike. It was a chaotic machine—a Frankenstein monster of parts. It had a banana seat with a tear in the vinyl that we had patched with silver duct tape. The handlebars had tassels once, but we had ripped them off because they weren’t “tough.” We put baseball cards in the spokes, held on by wooden clothespins stolen from my mother’s laundry line. Thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack. That was the soundtrack of our lives. It sounded like a motorcycle engine to us. It sounded like power.

I opened my eyes. The sound was gone. A Tesla drove past me, silent as a ghost, looking like a spaceship. The driver didn’t wave. We used to wave at every car. If you didn’t wave, you were rude. Now, if you wave, you’re suspicious.

I kept walking, my pace quickening. I was heading toward the treeline at the back of the subdivision. That thin strip of woods was all that was left of the Great Forest. That’s what we called it. The Great Forest. In reality, it was probably only fifty acres of scrub oak and pine sandwiched between the highway and the cornfields, but to us, it was the Amazon. It was Sherwood Forest. It was the surface of Mars.

It was where we built The Fort.

I reached the edge of the pavement. The sidewalk ended abruptly, chopped off into a patch of dirt. A chain-link fence stood there now, bearing a bright orange sign: PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

I stared at the sign. I felt a surge of irrational, hot anger bubble up in my chest. Prosecuted. For what? For walking on the earth? For trying to find a piece of my own history?

I looked left. Then right. No one was watching. The security cameras were pointed at driveways, not the woods.

I grabbed the top of the fence. The metal was warm. I hoisted myself up. My dress shoes slipped on the diamond mesh, scuffing the leather, but I didn’t care. I swung a leg over, feeling the snag of the wire on my suit trousers. I dropped down onto the other side, landing in a pile of dry leaves and pine needles. The impact jarred my teeth.

I was in.

The smell hit me instantly. It was the smell of decomposition and life mixed together—damp earth, rotting logs, pine sap, and wild onion. It was the perfume of my childhood.

I began to push through the undergrowth. It was thicker than I remembered, or maybe I was just bigger. Briars grabbed at my sleeves, tearing small holes in the fabric. I swatted a mosquito away from my ear.

We scraped our knees, climbed trees, and built forts.

The memory washed over me, so vivid it nearly brought me to my knees.

It was the summer of 1986. We were twelve. That was the Golden Year. Old enough to be allowed out of sight for hours, young enough not to care about girls or jobs yet.

We had decided we needed a headquarters. A place that was ours. No parents. No teachers. No rules.

“We need plywood,” Tommy had said, his face smeared with dirt. He was always the architect. I was the laborer.

“Where are we gonna get plywood?” I had asked.

“The construction site on Miller Road. They have tons of it. Scraps. They won’t miss it.”

I remembered the heist. It felt like a covert military operation. We waited until the workers left at 5:00 PM. We snuck onto the lot, our hearts hammering against our ribs like trapped birds. We found three sheets of warped plywood and a box of rusty nails. We dragged those boards for two miles. Two miles! We didn’t have a truck. We didn’t have a wagon. We carried them, our fingers getting slivers, our arms shaking from the weight, stopping every hundred yards to rest and check for “spies.”

We dragged them deep into these woods, to a spot near the creek—the “Crick”—where three large oak trees grew in a triangle. It was the perfect natural foundation.

I pushed a low-hanging branch out of my face, snapping back to the present. The woods were darker now. The sun was setting, casting long, skeletal shadows through the trees. I stumbled over a root, catching myself on a sapling.

I was getting close. I knew the topography. Down the ravine, across the dry creek bed, up the bank.

I slid down the embankment, ruining the heels of my shoes. The creek was bone dry. We didn’t drink bottled water; we drank from the garden hose. But sometimes, when we were deep in the woods, we drank from the creek. We called it “Mountain Spring Water.” It was probably runoff from the farm next door, full of fertilizer and who knows what else. But we drank it from cupped hands, splashing it on our faces to cool down. We didn’t get sick. Or if we did, we didn’t tell anyone.

I climbed the other side of the bank. My breath was coming in short, ragged gasps. I was out of shape. I was soft.

“Come on, Jack,” I whispered to myself. “Almost there.”

I pushed through a final wall of rhododendrons and stepped into the clearing.

And I stopped.

My heart didn’t just break; it evaporated.

The clearing was gone. The three oak trees—our guardians, our pillars—were gone.

In their place was a massive, rusted drainage pipe jutting out of a concrete wall. The area had been leveled, graded, and turned into a retention pond for the new development phase. The ground was scarred with tire tracks from bulldozers. There was plastic debris everywhere—empty water bottles, shreds of blue tarp, a fast-food cup.

I stood there, staring at the concrete monstrosity. It was ugly. It was functional. It was permanent.

I walked to the center of where the fort used to be. The ground was hard-packed clay now.

I closed my eyes and tried to summon the ghost of the structure.

It had been a masterpiece of junk engineering. We had nailed the plywood to the trunks of the oaks. We used a blue tarp for the roof. We found an old carpet remnant in a dumpster—shag orange, smelling of mildew—and laid it on the dirt floor. That was our living room.

We had a crate we used as a table. On that table, we kept our treasures.

I remembered the “Treasury.” It was an old metal lunchbox—a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe lunchbox. Inside, we kept the things that mattered. A pocketknife with a broken tip. A perfectly round white rock we found in the creek. A comic book (X-Men #142) that we read until the cover fell off. And a piece of paper. The Contract.

I sank down onto the dirt, ignoring the stains on my suit pants. I sat cross-legged, just like I used to.

The Contract.

I could see it clearly. We had written it in red crayon.

RULES OF THE FORT: 1. No girls allowed (unless it’s Jennifer Connors). 2. No parents allowed EVER. 3. If one guy gets in a fight, the other guy has to jump in. 4. Jack and Tommy are brothers. Not fake brothers. Real brothers.

We had signed it. And then, because we had seen it in a movie, we pricked our fingers with the pocketknife and pressed our thumbs onto the paper. A blood oath.

I looked at my thumb. The scar was gone, faded into the wrinkles of age. But I could still feel the sting.

“We promised, Tommy,” I said to the empty air. My voice cracked. “We promised we’d be brothers.”

The wind picked up, rustling the dry leaves of the surrounding scrub brush. It sounded like a whisper.

I looked around the ground, desperate for something. Anything. A piece of wood. A nail. A shard of the blue tarp. I needed physical proof that we had existed. That we hadn’t just been hallucinations.

I began to dig with my bare hands. I clawed at the hard-packed clay, breaking my fingernails. I dug frantically, like a dog. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I just needed to get beneath this new, sterile layer of dirt. I needed to reach the 1980s layer.

“Come on,” I grunted, tears finally spilling over, hot and stinging on my cheeks. “Come on, damn it.”

My fingers hit something hard.

I stopped. My heart hammered. I brushed away the loose dirt.

It wasn’t the lunchbox. It wasn’t the knife.

It was a piece of plastic. Rigid, faded, yellowed plastic. I pried it out of the earth and held it up to the dying light.

It was the wheel of a toy truck. A Tonka truck.

I wiped the dirt off it with my thumb. I remembered this. It wasn’t mine. It was Tommy’s. He had buried a broken Tonka truck here when we broke ground on the fort, saying it was “good luck,” like burying a statue of a saint.

I clutched the plastic wheel in my hand, squeezing it so hard the edges bit into my palm.

The memories came flooding back, not as a gentle stream, but as a tidal wave.

I remembered the day Tommy’s dad left.

It was a Tuesday. I was at the fort waiting for him. He showed up an hour late. He didn’t have his bike. He had walked. He wasn’t crying, but his face was pale, his eyes wide and shocked, like he’d seen a car crash.

He crawled into the fort and sat on the orange carpet.

“He’s gone,” Tommy had said.

“Who?”

“My dad. He packed a bag. He said he’s going to California.”

I didn’t know what to say. We were twelve. We didn’t have the emotional vocabulary for abandonment. We didn’t have text messages to send sad emojis. We didn’t have therapists.

So I did the only thing I knew how to do.

I reached into the lunchbox and pulled out a pack of Bubble Yum. I unwrapped a piece and handed it to him.

“Here,” I said.

He took it. He chewed it. We sat there for three hours in silence, just chewing gum and throwing rocks at a tree stump.

That was the day the fort stopped being just a place to play and started being a place to survive. It was our bunker against the world. When my mom started drinking too much wine and yelling at the TV, I went to the fort. When Tommy’s mom was crying in the kitchen because the electricity bill was overdue, he went to the fort.

We raised ourselves in this square of plywood.

And now, looking at this retention pond, I realized that nobody knew that history. To the developers, this was just coordinates on a survey map. To the new homeowners, it was just “drainage.”

But to me, this was holy ground.

I put the plastic wheel in my pocket, right next to the funeral program.

The sun had set. The woods were turning grey and shadowy. The crickets were starting their chorus—a sound that hadn’t changed in forty years.

I needed to leave. But I couldn’t go back to my house. Not yet. I couldn’t face the air conditioning and the silence.

I stood up, dusting the red clay off my knees. I looked toward the other side of the woods. If I cut through the treeline and crossed the old creek bed, I would come out on Elm Street.

Elm Street. Where Tommy’s house used to be.

The house where we knocked on the door to see if he could play.

I hadn’t been to that house in twenty years. Tommy’s mom had sold it back in ’99 and moved to Florida. I didn’t know who lived there now.

But I felt a magnetic pull. I needed to see it. I needed to see the screen door. I needed to see the driveway where we spent hours shooting basketballs into a hoop with no net.

I started walking again, deeper into the darkening woods, moving toward the ghost of the boy I used to know. The branches whipped my face, but I didn’t feel them. I was numb. I was on a mission.

As I walked, I thought about the kids on the bench with their iPads. They would never have this. They would never have a secret kingdom in the woods that belonged only to them. If they wanted to build a fort, they’d do it in Minecraft. If they wanted to talk, they’d do it over Discord.

They would never know the specific, tactile joy of finding a perfect stick that looked like a sword. They would never know the terror of being in the woods when the sun went down, running home because you convinced yourself a werewolf was chasing you.

They were safe. But they were starving.

I emerged from the woods, scratching my arm on a final blackberry bush. I stepped onto the pavement of Elm Street.

The streetlights flickered on. Buzz. Click.

The amber light flooded the street.

We came home when the streetlights turned on.

That was the rule.

“I’m late, Tommy,” I whispered. “I’m forty years late.”

I looked down the street. It looked different, yet exactly the same. The trees were bigger. The cars were newer. But the shape of the houses was the anchor.

And there it was. 402 Elm Street.

My breath caught in my throat.

It was painted blue now. It used to be white. The big oak tree in the front yard—the one we tried to climb a thousand times—was gone, just a stump remaining.

But the driveway was there. And the front porch.

I started walking toward it. I knew I shouldn’t. It was trespassing. It was weird. A grown man in a dirty suit walking up to a stranger’s house at dusk.

But I couldn’t stop. It was muscle memory. My legs were just carrying out the routine of a thousand afternoons.

Rap-rap-rap.

I could hear the sound of my knock before I even reached the door.

I stopped at the edge of the lawn. There was a tricycle in the driveway. Plastic. Bright pink.

A light was on in the living room window. The warm glow of a lamp.

I took a step onto the driveway. The concrete was cracked in the same places. I remembered that crack. That was where the ant hills used to be. We used to burn them with a magnifying glass. Cruel, bored boys.

I took another step.

Then I saw him.

Or I thought I saw him.

For a split second, in the shadows of the porch, I saw a boy sitting on the steps, tying his shoe. High-top sneakers. Jeans with holes in the knees. A striped t-shirt.

“Tommy?” I choked out.

The figure didn’t move.

I blinked, wiping the moisture from my eyes.

It wasn’t Tommy. It was a bag of potting soil someone had left on the steps.

My chest heaved. I felt like I was going to throw up. The grief hit me then, harder than it had at the funeral. At the funeral, it was ceremonial. It was stiff. Here, on this driveway, it was raw. It was real.

This was where we fixed our bikes. This was where we had water balloon fights. This was where we sat and talked about what we would do when we were rich and famous.

“We were gonna be astronauts, man,” I said to the bag of potting soil. “We were gonna go to Mars.”

I looked up at the window. Inside, I could see a silhouette moving. A father, maybe. Holding a baby.

I wanted to go up there. I wanted to knock. We didn’t have text messages; we knocked on our friend’s door.

I wanted to knock and ask, “Is Tommy home?”

I wanted the man to say, “Yeah, he’s out back.”

I wanted to walk into the backyard and see him there, waiting for me, holding the hose.

“Drink up,” he’d say. “It tastes like freedom.”

But I knew if I knocked, a stranger would answer. A stranger who would look at me with suspicion. Who would see a dirty, crying middle-aged man and reach for his phone to call the police.

I stood frozen in the driveway, caught between the past and the present, paralyzed by the impossible distance between the two.

Then, the front door opened.

My heart stopped.

A little boy stepped out. He couldn’t have been more than eight. He was wearing pajamas with dinosaurs on them. He held a tablet in his hand.

He looked up and saw me standing in the driveway.

We locked eyes.

I expected him to run. I expected him to scream for his dad.

But he just stared at me. His face was illuminated by the blue light of the screen in his hand.

“Are you looking for something?” he asked. His voice was small, polite.

I opened my mouth, but no words came out. What was I looking for?

I was looking for 1986. I was looking for my best friend. I was looking for the version of myself that believed the world was big and full of magic, not small and full of screens.

“I…” I stammered. I looked at the house. I looked at the stump where the tree used to be. I looked back at the boy.

“I used to live near here,” I said, my voice trembling. “I had a friend who lived in this house.”

The boy looked down at his tablet, tapped something, then looked back up. “Nobody lives here but us. And my dog, Buster.”

“I know,” I said softly. “I know.”

The boy tilted his head. “Did you lose something?”

I reached into my pocket and felt the plastic wheel of the Tonka truck.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I did.”

“My dad says if you lose something, you can use the AirTag to find it,” the boy said helpfully.

I let out a short, wet laugh. It hurt my chest. “We didn’t have AirTags back then, kid. We just had to hope it turned up.”

The boy looked confused. He didn’t understand. How could he?

Kids today will never understand.

“You better go inside,” I said. “The streetlights are on.”

The boy looked at the streetlight, then back at his screen. “So?”

“So,” I said, pointing at the light. “That means it’s time to go home. That’s the rule.”

The boy shrugged. “Okay.”

He turned and went back inside, the door clicking shut behind him. The lock turned. Click.

I was alone again.

I stood there for another minute, listening to the buzz of the light.

I turned around and began the long walk back to my house. I didn’t cut through the woods this time. I walked on the sidewalk. I walked past the manicured lawns.

I felt heavier than before, but also lighter. I had said goodbye to the fort. I had said goodbye to the house.

I reached my own driveway. My house was dark. My wife was probably in the den, watching Netflix.

I didn’t go inside.

Instead, I walked to the side of the house. I pushed through the overgrown azalea bushes that the gardener kept telling me to trim.

I found the spigot.

It was old. Rusty. Covered in spiderwebs.

I reached down and grabbed the green rubber hose that was coiled on the ground. It was stiff from disuse.

I turned the handle. Squeak. Groan.

Water sputtered out of the nozzle. It wasn’t a smooth stream. It coughed and spat air, then finally flowed clear.

I hesitated.

It was unsanitary. It was lead pipes. It was bacteria. That’s what the news said. That’s what the doctors said.

But I didn’t care.

I lifted the hose to my lips. The water was freezing cold. It smelled like rubber and wet pennies.

I closed my eyes and drank.

The shock of the cold water hit the back of my throat. It tasted metallic. It tasted like iron.

It tasted like August 1986.

It tasted like Tommy laughing.

It tasted like freedom.

I drank until my chin was wet, until I was gasping for air. I let the water run over my face, mixing with the tears and the sweat.

For a brief, shining moment, I wasn’t a forty-nine-year-old man standing in a suit in the dark.

I was ten. The streetlights were on. And I was home.

“Thanks, Tommy,” I whispered into the hose.

I turned the water off. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

I looked up at the sky. There were no stars, only the orange glow of the city lights reflecting off the clouds.

But I knew they were there. Behind the light pollution, the stars were still there.

We didn’t have much, but we had everything.

I walked to my front door, opened it, and stepped inside.

“Jack? Is that you?” my wife called from the other room.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice steady for the first time all day. “It’s me. I’m home.”

Part 3: One Last Knock

The streetlights of Elm Street were not just lights; they were sentinels. They stood tall and crooked, their amber necks craned over the asphalt, buzzing with a sound that felt less like electricity and more like the vibration of a trapped insect. Zzzzt. Zzzzt.

I stood at the edge of the property line of 402 Elm Street. My dress shoes, scuffed and coated in the red clay from the woods, felt heavy, as if the gravity on this specific patch of earth was stronger than anywhere else in Ohio.

To anyone driving by—perhaps the soccer mom in the silver minivan who had just slowed down to eye me suspiciously—I was a disturbance. I was a middle-aged man in a disheveled funeral suit, standing in the shadows of a suburban lawn that didn’t belong to him. I was a “suspicious person.” I was a potential threat on the neighborhood watch app.

But inside my head, I wasn’t forty-nine. I wasn’t a tax accountant with high blood pressure and a lease on a car I didn’t like. Inside my head, I was standing on the edge of the universe.

The house sat there, indifferent to my internal collapse. It had been painted a sensible shade of slate blue, the trim crisp and white. A wreath of fake hydrangeas hung on the door. It was a house that whispered of credit scores, lawn services, and bedtimes enforced by Alexa.

But underneath that slate blue paint, I knew the truth. I knew the wood was rotting near the gutters. I knew the third step on the porch was hollow. I knew that if you crawled under the latticework of the deck, you would find a rusted Folgers coffee can filled with 1987 pennies.

I took a breath. The air smelled of freshly cut grass and dryer sheets—the smell of the modern American dream. But if I inhaled deeper, past the chemical sweetness, I could smell the ghosts. I could smell the charcoal of a Weber grill from a Fourth of July thirty years ago. I could smell the ozone of a coming storm.

I took one step onto the concrete driveway.

The texture under my thin soles was familiar. My body remembered the topography of this driveway better than it remembered my own wife’s face some days. This was where I learned to ride a skateboard. This was where I learned that gravity is unforgiving. This was where Tommy and I had spent thousands of hours shooting hoops into a rim with no net, the ball making a dull thump-thump-thump that echoed off the garage door.

I looked at the garage door. It was closed. A keypad was mounted on the frame.

We didn’t have keypads, I thought, a bitter laugh bubbling in my throat. We had a key hidden under a fake rock that looked nothing like a rock.

I needed to knock. The prompt in my brain was flashing like a neon sign: CLIMAX. DO IT. But my legs refused to move.

Why was this so hard? It was just a door. Tommy didn’t live here anymore. I knew that. Logically, I knew that. His mother had sold the place in 1999 to a couple from Dayton. They had probably sold it to someone else. The people inside were strangers. They owed me nothing.

But grief is not logical. Grief is a time machine that breaks the gears. Grief tells you that if you just knock hard enough, if you just believe hard enough, the laws of physics will bend, time will fold back on itself, and the door will open to reveal a twelve-year-old boy holding a Super Soaker, asking if you want a popsicle.

I closed my eyes, and suddenly, the slate blue house vanished. The silence of the 2024 evening shattered.

---

The Memory: July 14, 1988

The heat that summer was a physical weight. It pressed down on the roof of the world, turning the asphalt soft and the air into soup. We were fourteen. The awkward age. Too old for toys, too young for cars. We were suspended in the purgatory of adolescence, fueled by boredom and testosterone.

It was 11:00 PM. A Thursday.

We didn’t have text messages. We had a signal.

I was lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling fan spinning lazily, trying to mentally will the temperature down. Then, I saw it. A flash of light against my bedroom window.

Three short flashes. Then a pause. Then one long flash.

Morse code for “Get out here.”

I rolled out of bed, silent as a ninja. I pulled on my denim shorts and a black t-shirt. I grabbed my sneakers, tying the laces together and draping them around my neck so I wouldn’t make a sound on the floorboards. I opened the window, popped the screen (which we kept permanently loose for this exact reason), and slid out onto the roof of the porch.

I dropped into the hydrangeas.

Tommy was waiting by the big oak tree. He was holding a heavy-duty flashlight—the kind that took four D-batteries and weighed five pounds. It was our Excalibur.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“The Trestle,” Tommy said. His eyes were wide, manic. “The rumor is true.”

“What rumor?”

“The ghost train,” he said, dead serious. “Jimmy Miller said his brother saw it last night. The Midnight Express. It comes through at 12:00 AM, but it’s not on the schedule.”

I rolled my eyes. “Jimmy Miller is a liar. He also said he kissed a girl from Canada.”

“Are you scared?” Tommy challenged. He knew the buttons to push. He knew exactly where the armor was weak.

“No,” I lied.

“Then let’s go.”

We grabbed our bikes from behind the hedge. We rode in silence, the wind drying the sweat on our forearms. The streetlights hummed above us—our amber guardians—but we were leaving their safety. We were heading to the edge of town, where the lights stopped and the dark began.

The Trestle was a railroad bridge that spanned the Black River. It was high—maybe fifty feet above the water—and narrow. There was no walkway. Just the tracks and the wooden ties, with gaps wide enough for a boy to fall through.

We hid our bikes in the tall grass near the embankment. The smell of creosote and old iron was overpowering. The river below was invisible, a black void that swallowed sound.

“We have to walk to the middle,” Tommy said.

“Why?”

“To feel it,” he said. “Jimmy said if you stand in the middle at midnight, you can feel the vibration of the ghost train before you hear it.”

It was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. It was dangerous. It was illegal.

It was perfect.

We climbed up the gravel embankment. The rocks shifted under our Converse sneakers. We stepped onto the tracks.

Step. Gap. Step. Gap.

I looked down between the ties. Nothing but darkness. If you fell, you wouldn’t even splash; you’d just vanish.

We made it to the center of the bridge. The air was cooler here, rising off the water.

“What time is it?” I asked, my voice trembling.

Tommy looked at his Casio digital watch. I remembered the blue backlight.

“11:58,” he whispered.

We stood there. Two boys on a bridge to nowhere. The silence was absolute. No crickets. No cars. Just the blood rushing in my ears.

Then, we felt it.

Not a ghost. Not a vibration.

A hum.

The rails began to sing. A low, metallic frequency that travelled up through the soles of my shoes and rattled my teeth.

“Tommy,” I said. “That’s not a ghost.”

Tommy looked back at the curve of the track, about a half-mile away.

A light swept across the trees. A massive, blinding, cyclopean eye.

The horn blared—a sound so loud it felt like a physical blow to the chest. BLAAAAAART!

It wasn’t the Midnight Express ghost. It was a CSX freight train, hauling coal, moving at sixty miles an hour. And it was coming around the bend.

“Run!” I screamed.

But there was nowhere to run. We were in the exact center. The train was closing the distance in seconds. We couldn’t outrun it to the end of the bridge.

“Jump!” Tommy yelled.

“Are you crazy? It’s fifty feet!”

“The platform!” he screamed, pointing.

About ten feet away, jutting out from the side of the bridge, was a small maintenance platform—a rusty metal grate barely big enough for two workers to stand on.

The train light was blinding us now. The noise was deafening, a cacophony of grinding steel and roaring diesel. The bridge was shaking so violently I could barely keep my footing.

Tommy grabbed my shirt. He didn’t ask. He didn’t negotiate. He yanked me.

“MOVE!”

We scrambled over the rail. The train was on us. The heat from the engine washed over us like a blast furnace.

We threw ourselves onto the rusty grate just as the locomotive thundered past.

The wind turbulence nearly sucked us back into the wheels. I curled into a ball, covering my head, screaming a scream that no one could hear over the roar of the train.

Clack-clack-clack-clack. Clack-clack-clack-clack.

The cars blurred past, inches from our faces. Sparks showered down on us, burning small holes in our clothes. The noise was a physical assault. It went on forever. A hundred cars. Coal dust filled our lungs.

And then, silence.

The red light of the caboose faded into the distance.

We were left lying on the grate, tangled together, covered in soot, shaking so hard our teeth chattered.

I looked at Tommy. His face was black with dust, except for the whites of his eyes and the tracks of tears running down his cheeks.

He looked at me. And then, he started to laugh.

It was a hysterical, broken sound. “We didn’t die!” he choked out. “Jack! We didn’t die!”

I started laughing too. We laughed until our ribs ached. We laughed because the alternative was to vomit from terror. We laughed because we were alive.

Tommy reached out and grabbed my hand. He squeezed it hard.

“We’re brothers,” he said, his voice fierce, cutting through the dark. “You hear me? We survive. That’s what we do. We survive everything.”

I squeezed back. “Yeah. Brothers.”

We lay there on that grate for an hour, watching the stars, too scared to move, too happy to leave.

---

The Present

I opened my eyes. The train was gone. The soot was gone.

I was standing in the driveway of 402 Elm Street. My hand was still empty. Tommy was dead. We hadn’t survived everything. He hadn’t survived the clot that stopped his heart while he was watching TV on a Tuesday afternoon.

The pact was broken.

The anger hit me then. A hot, molten wave of fury. How dare he? How dare he leave me here with these memories? How dare he leave me in a world of TikTok and AI and loneliness?

I took the final steps to the porch.

My shadow stretched long across the slate blue siding. The porch light was on—a motion sensor LED that was too bright, too clinical. It didn’t have the warm, welcoming buzz of the old incandescent bulbs.

I looked at the door. It was heavy wood, reinforced.

I raised my hand. My fist was trembling. I looked at my knuckles—liver spots beginning to form, skin paper-thin. These were not the hands that gripped the rusty grate of the trestle. These were the hands of a stranger.

Just knock, you coward.

I knocked.

Rap. Rap. Rap.

The sound was hollow. It didn’t echo like it used to.

I waited.

Inside the house, the muffled sound of a television stopped. I heard footsteps. Heavy ones. Not a child. A man.

Panic flared in my chest. What was I doing? This was insanity. I should run. I should bolt down the driveway, jump in my car, and drive until the gas ran out.

But my feet were nailed to the Welcome mat.

The lock clicked. The deadbolt slid back with a heavy thud.

The door opened.

A man stood there. He was younger than me—maybe early thirties. He was wearing a grey t-shirt that said “NVIDIA” and sweatpants. He had a beard, neatly trimmed. He was holding a half-eaten slice of pizza.

He looked at me. He looked at my suit. He looked at my tear-streaked face. He looked at the mud on my shoes.

His expression wasn’t angry. It was confused. Guarded.

“Can I help you?” he asked. His voice was polite, but tight. The universal voice of Why are you on my porch at 8:30 PM?

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words were stuck behind a dam of grief.

“I…” I croaked. I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

The man chewed his pizza slowly, not taking his eyes off me. A dog barked somewhere inside—a sharp, yipping sound. Not a big dog like Tommy’s retriever. A small, indoor dog.

“Is everything okay?” the man asked, stepping slightly forward, effectively blocking the view into the house. He was assessing the threat level.

“I grew up here,” I blurted out.

The man paused. His shoulders relaxed, just a fraction. “Oh. Okay.”

“My best friend,” I continued, the words tumbling out faster now, desperate to justify my existence on his step. “My best friend lived in this house. Thomas. Tommy O’Connell.”

The man nodded slowly. “I think… yeah, I think the previous owners mentioned the O’Connells. They built the deck, right?”

“No,” I whispered. “We built the deck. Me and Tommy and his dad. Summer of ’89.”

The man looked at me, really looked at me. He saw the grief. You can’t hide that kind of grief. It wears you like a heavy coat.

“Did… did something happen?” the man asked gently.

“He died,” I said. “Three days ago. We buried him today.”

The silence that followed was thick. The man shifted his weight. He held the pizza slice awkwardly, realizing it was inappropriate for the moment.

“I’m sorry for your loss, man,” he said. And he meant it. He was a good guy. He was a nice, modern American dad.

“I just…” I looked past him, trying to see into the hallway. I wanted to see the staircase. I wanted to see the bannister we used to slide down. “I just wanted to see if the ghost was still here.”

“The ghost?” The man raised an eyebrow.

“Not a real ghost,” I said quickly, realizing I sounded crazy. “Just… the feeling. The memory.”

I looked down at the porch floorboards.

“We sat right here,” I said, pointing to a spot near the railing. “Right here. We traded baseball cards. I traded him a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card for a bag of Jolly Ranchers. Worst trade of my life.”

The man smiled faintly. “Sounds like a bad trade.”

“It was,” I said. “But he shared the Jolly Ranchers. So maybe it was even.”

I looked back at the man. “Do you have kids?”

“Yeah,” he said. “A boy. Leo. He’s eight.”

“Does he play outside?”

The man sighed, a sound of shared parental frustration. “Not as much as I’d like. It’s… different now, you know? iPads. Roblox. It’s hard to get them out the door.”

Kids today will never understand.

“Tell him to go outside,” I said, my voice intensifying. I stepped closer. The man stiffened.

“Tell him to go outside,” I repeated, my voice cracking. “Take the iPad away. Throw it in the trash. Lock the door. Make him bored. Boredom is where the magic happens. Tell him to go find a creek. Tell him to scrape his knees.”

Tears were streaming down my face now, hot and embarrassing.

“Sir, I think maybe you should…” the man began, reaching for the door frame.

“I’m not crazy,” I sobbed. “I’m just… I’m just lonely. It’s so quiet. Why is the world so quiet now?”

I collapsed.

It wasn’t a theatrical faint. It was my legs simply giving up on the concept of standing. I sank down onto the top step of the porch, burying my face in my hands. The grief I had been holding back through the wake, through the service, through the burial—it all came out.

I cried for Tommy. I cried for the fort that was a drainage pipe. I cried for the train trestle. I cried for the hose water. I cried for the fact that I couldn’t remember the last time I knocked on a door just to say hello.

I sat there, a grown man in a dirty suit, weeping on a stranger’s porch under the harsh glare of a motion-sensor light.

The man didn’t call the police.

After a moment, I heard the screen door creak open wider.

“Honey?” a woman’s voice called from inside. “Who is it?”

“It’s okay,” the man said softly. “Just… give us a minute.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was tentative, warm.

“Hey,” the man said. he was crouching down beside me. “It’s alright. Breathe.”

I took a shuddering breath. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve, smearing snot and dirt on the expensive fabric.

“I’m sorry,” I gasped. “I’m so sorry. This is… this is inappropriate.”

“It’s okay,” the man said. “My dad died last year. I get it. Grief makes you do weird stuff. I tried to call his voicemail for three months just to hear the greeting.”

I looked at him. We shared a look. The universal brotherhood of loss.

“He was my brother,” I said. “Not by blood. But by… everything else.”

“I believe you,” the man said.

He stood up. “Look, do you want a glass of water? Or… I don’t know, a beer?”

Water.

The word triggered something.

I looked at the side of the house. The shadows were deep there.

“No,” I said, wiping my face again. I stood up, my knees groaning. I felt drained, hollowed out, but the manic energy was gone. The storm had passed.

“No water,” I said. “I should go. My wife… she’s probably wondering where I am.”

“Are you sure you’re okay to drive?”

“I walked,” I said.

“You walked?” He looked at his watch. “It’s late.”

“I know the way,” I said. “We didn’t have GPS; we had to remember the way home.“

The man smiled. “Okay. Well. Take care of yourself.”

“You too,” I said. I looked at him one last time. “Hey. That deck? The one in the back?”

“Yeah?”

“Check the loose board near the railing. The one on the far left.”

“Why?”

“We carved our initials underneath it. J.M. and T.O. 1989.”

The man’s eyes widened slightly. “I’ll look. Tomorrow.”

“Don’t paint over it,” I said. It was a plea.

“I won’t,” he promised.

I turned and walked down the steps. I felt lighter. Not happy. But the crushing weight was gone. I had knocked. I had made contact. I had confirmed that the house was still standing, that life was continuing inside of it.

I walked down the driveway, past the imaginary ant hills, past the invisible basketball court.

I reached the sidewalk. The boy—Leo—was not there. The window was dark.

But as I turned to leave, I saw something.

On the side of the house, near the garage, a coil of green rubber lay in the grass. The garden hose.

It called to me.

The narrative arc was closing. The circle was completing.

I looked back at the porch. The man had gone inside. The door was closed.

I stepped off the driveway and onto the grass. The dew soaked through my socks.

I walked to the spigot.

This was the Resolution. This was the Communion.

I reached down. My hands were shaking, not from fear, but from reverence. I picked up the nozzle. It was cold. heavy.

I turned the handle. Squeak.

The water rushed out.

I didn’t care about the germs. I didn’t care about the optics.

I lifted the hose to my mouth.

It tasted like iron. It tasted like the Great Forest before the bulldozers. It tasted like the fear on the train trestle. It tasted like the blood oath in the fort. It tasted like Tommy.

I drank. And for a brief, shining second, the years fell away. The timeline corrected itself. I was not alone.

I lowered the hose. Water dripped from my chin onto my tie.

“See you later, alligator,” I whispered into the dark.

And in the silence of the suburbs, I swear I heard the faint, distant echo of a voice:

“After ‘while, crocodile.”

I turned and began the walk home, under the watchful, buzzing eyes of the streetlights.

Part 4: The Taste of Iron

The sound of the deadbolt sliding home at 402 Elm Street echoed in the quiet night like a judge’s gavel. Click. It was a final sound. The young father, with his NVIDIA shirt and his guarded kindness, had retreated back into the safety of his modern life, leaving me standing alone on the sidewalk.

I didn’t move immediately. I couldn’t. My body felt heavy, anchored by the gravity of the emotional storm I had just weathered. The adrenaline that had propelled me through the woods, that had given me the courage to trespass and the audacity to knock on a stranger’s door, was evaporating. In its place, a profound, aching exhaustion settled into my marrow. It was the kind of tiredness that isn’t just about sleep; it was the tiredness of a soul that has traveled too far in too short a time.

I looked down at my hands. They were trembling slightly. They were stained with the red clay of the creek bed and the black garden soil of the woods. There was a smear of green algae on my left cuff. I looked like a man who had clawed his way out of a grave. And in a way, I supposed I had. I had clawed my way out of the grave of my own numbness.

I turned away from the slate-blue house. I turned away from the ghost of the boy sitting on the porch steps tying his high-tops. I turned away from the memory of the basketball hoop that wasn’t there anymore.

“Goodbye, Tommy,” I whispered.

The words didn’t float away; they seemed to hang in the humid air, suspended in the amber cone of light from the streetlamp above me.

I began the walk home.

The Long Walk

My house was only six blocks away. In a car, it was a ninety-second drive. You wouldn’t even finish a song on the radio. But on foot, at 9:15 PM on a Tuesday in a sleeping subdivision, it was an odyssey.

I walked down the center of the street. There was no traffic. There never was anymore. The streets of Oak Creek Estates were designed for cars, not people. They were wide, curving ribbons of asphalt flanked by manicured lawns that looked like green carpet. There were no sidewalks in this part of the neighborhood—a subtle architectural hint that walking was an activity for the poor or the suspicious.

I listened to the sound of my dress shoes on the pavement. Clack. Scuff. Clack. Scuff. One of my heels was coming loose, a casualty of the slide down the ravine embankment. It gave my gait a broken, syncopated rhythm.

The silence of the modern world pressed against my eardrums. It was a dense, physical weight.

I tried to remember the soundscape of 1986.

We didn’t have much, but we had everything. And part of “everything” was the noise. The world used to be so loud.

In 1986, this time of night would have been a symphony. You would have heard the distant, tinny sound of a baseball game on a transistor radio coming from a garage. You would have heard the thwack-thwack of a screen door slamming as a kid ran out to catch the last five minutes of daylight. You would have heard Mrs. Higgins yelling for her dog, Buster. You would have heard the hum of box fans in windows, because not everyone had central air yet.

Now? Silence. Hermetically sealed silence.

Every house I passed was a fortress. The windows were dark, or glowed with the cold, blue flicker of large-screen televisions. The central air conditioning units hummed behind fences, a low, industrial drone that masked the sound of the crickets.

I felt like an astronaut walking on the surface of a colonized moon. Same planet, different atmosphere.

I passed the intersection of Maple Drive. I stopped.

To the left was the drainage grate.

I walked over to it. I peered down through the iron bars. It was black down there, smelling of wet concrete and rotting leaves.

The Pennywise Drain. That’s what we called it. We dared each other to stick our arms through the bars.

“I bet you won’t do it, Jack,” Tommy had said, his eyes gleaming with mischievous delight. “I bet you’re too chicken.”

“I’m not chicken,” I had retorted, my voice cracking.

I had lain down on the hot asphalt, feeling the grit bite into my elbows, and reached my hand into the darkness. I touched nothing but air, but the terror was electric. I had pulled my arm back as if a shark had snapped at me, and we had screamed and run halfway down the block, laughing until we collapsed on someone’s lawn.

I stood there now, a forty-nine-year-old tax accountant, and felt a phantom shiver run up my spine. The magic was still there, faintly, trapped in the infrastructure.

I kept walking.

My knee was throbbing. The scrape I had gotten in the woods was stinging, the fabric of my trousers sticking to the drying blood. It was a good pain. It was a sharp, clarifying pain. It reminded me that I was a biological entity, not just a LinkedIn profile.

We scraped our knees, climbed trees, and built forts.

We wore our scabs like badges of honor. A clean knee meant you had a boring weekend. A scab meant you had an adventure. A cast on your arm? That was heroic status. You were a king for six weeks.

I touched the fabric over my knee. I wondered if I would have a scar. I hoped so. I wanted a scar from tonight. I wanted a permanent reminder that the day I buried my best friend was also the day I woke up.

I passed the cul-de-sac where the Miller brothers used to live. (No relation to me). They had a trampoline. An unsafe, rust-springed death trap of a trampoline with no safety net. We used to play “Crack the Egg” on it until someone cried.

The house was still there, but the trampoline was gone. In its place was a pristine rock garden and a fountain that trickled water over a sphere of polished granite. It was tasteful. It was Zen. It was incredibly boring.

Kids today will never understand.

They have trampoline parks now. Indoor facilities with foam pits and waivers you have to sign and teenagers in referee shirts blowing whistles if you double-bounce. It’s safe. It’s sanitized. It’s fun, I guess. But it’s not freedom. Freedom is a rusted spring pinching your thigh while you try to do a backflip in the dark.

I looked up at the streetlights.

They were my companions on this walk. They buzzed and flickered, casting long, stretching shadows that rotated around me as I passed beneath them.

We came home when the streetlights turned on.

That rule was hard-wired into my DNA. Seeing them on now triggered a deep, primal anxiety. I’m late, my inner child whispered. Mom’s gonna be mad. Dad’s gonna be standing on the porch with his arms crossed.

But Mom was gone. Dad was gone. And I was the man of the house now.

The realization hit me with a fresh wave of grief. I was the oldest generation in my line. There was no one above me to enforce the curfew. There was no one to tell me to wash up for dinner. I was the one who set the alarm. I was the one who locked the doors.

I was alone at the top of the pyramid.

And Tommy was gone from the spot beside me.

I stopped walking again. I needed a moment. I leaned against a brick mailbox (315 Maple Drive). The rough brick scratched my suit jacket.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the funeral program again. It was limp and damp from the humidity. I unfolded it carefully.

There was a photo of Tommy on the front. A professional headshot from his real estate website. He looked good. He looked like a grown-up. He was wearing a blazer. He had a confident smile.

But that wasn’t the Tommy I knew.

I closed my eyes and summoned the real face.

I saw him with a gap-toothed grin, chocolate ice cream smeared on his chin. I saw him with a black eye he got from a foul tip in Little League. I saw him with a terrible haircut his mom gave him in the kitchen. I saw him breathless, sweaty, and radiant, holding a garden hose like a scepter.

“We didn’t have GPS,” I whispered to the empty street. “We had to remember.”

And I did remember. I remembered every turn. I remembered every shortcut. I remembered the code.

I folded the program and put it back in my pocket, right next to the plastic Tonka wheel. My two talismans. One of death, one of life.

I pushed off the mailbox and continued the trudge.

The Fortress

I turned the corner onto my street: Sycamore Lane.

My house was at the very end, in the premium cul-de-sac. It was the house I had promised myself I would buy when I was poor and starting out. It was a symbol of success.

And it was beautiful. I couldn’t deny that. It was a sprawling two-story brick colonial with a three-car garage and architectural shingles. The landscaping was impeccable—the result of a crew of guys who came every Thursday morning to trim, blow, and edge until nature looked like geometry.

But tonight, looking at it through the lens of my 1986 eyes, it looked like a mausoleum.

It was dark, except for the security lights that blazed from the eaves. They were bright white LED floods, designed to blind intruders and capture clear footage for the Ring doorbell.

It looked sterile. It looked unlived in.

I walked up the driveway. The concrete was smooth, uncracked. I had it resurfaced last year. There were no oil stains. There were no chalk drawings. There were no stray basketballs.

I saw my reflection in the side window of my SUV, which was parked in the driveway because the garage was full of “stuff”—not tools or bikes, but Christmas decorations and boxes of things we hadn’t unpacked in five years.

The reflection startled me.

I looked wild. My hair was standing up in tufts where I had run my hands through it. My tie was pulled loose, the knot hanging halfway down my chest. My shirt was translucent with sweat. My suit jacket was torn at the shoulder, a jagged rip from the chain-link fence.

I didn’t look like Jack Miller, CPA. I looked like a vagrant. I looked like a man who had lost his mind.

But as I stared at myself, a strange thought occurred to me: This is the most honest I have looked in twenty years.

I wasn’t hiding behind a suit anymore. The suit was ruined. I was wearing the chaos of the world on my skin.

I walked to the front door. It was a massive thing, mahogany with beveled glass inserts.

I reached for my keys, then remembered I didn’t need them. I had a smart lock.

I punched in the code: 1-9-8-6.

It was the year we built the fort. I had used it as my code for everything—my ATM card, my garage door, my phone. My wife thought it was just a random number. She didn’t know it was a memorial.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Whirrr-click.

The door unlocked.

I pushed it open and stepped into the air conditioning.

The Interior

The transition was jarring.

Outside, the air was a living thing—hot, humid, smelling of ozone and wet grass and exhaust. It was heavy and loud.

Inside, the air was dead. It was chilled to a precise sixty-eight degrees. It was dry. It smelled of “Fresh Linen” plug-in scent warmers and chemically treated dust.

The silence was absolute. It wasn’t the silence of the woods, which is actually full of life. It was the silence of a vacuum.

My shoes sounded too loud on the hardwood floor of the foyer. Clack. Clack.

I stood in the entryway, dripping sweat onto the Persian rug. I felt like an intruder in my own home. I felt like a wild animal that had wandered into a laboratory.

“Jack?”

The voice came from the den. It was Sarah.

I took a deep breath. I had to switch gears. I had to translate my experience into a language she would understand.

She walked into the hallway. She was wearing her reading glasses and holding a tablet. She looked clean. She looked safe. She looked worried.

“Jack?” She stopped dead when she saw me. Her eyes went wide. She took in the mud on my shoes, the tear in my jacket, the wild look in my eyes.

“Oh my god,” she breathed. She dropped the tablet on the hall table. “Jack, what happened? Are you hurt? Did you wreck the car?”

She rushed toward me, her hands hovering, afraid to touch the filth but desperate to check for injuries.

“I’m okay,” I said. My voice sounded rough, like I had been screaming, though I hadn’t. “I’m okay, Sarah.”

“You’re not okay!” she cried. “Look at you! You’re covered in… is that mud? And blood?”

She pointed to my shin, where the blood had soaked through the fabric of my trousers.

“I fell,” I said. “It’s just a scrape.”

“Where have you been?” she demanded, her fear turning into the sharp edge of relief. “The funeral was over hours ago. I’ve been texting you. I called you ten times.”

“I know,” I said softly. “I didn’t look at my phone.”

We didn’t have text messages.

“I thought you had a heart attack,” she said, her voice trembling. “I thought you were lying in a ditch somewhere.”

“I was,” I said. “Sort of.”

I walked past her, into the kitchen. I needed to sit down. My legs were shaking.

The kitchen was a masterpiece of modern design. Quartz countertops. Stainless steel appliances that cost more than my first three cars combined. Under-cabinet lighting that made everything look surgical.

I sat on one of the high-backed bar stools. I felt ridiculous. A mud-caked gargoyle perched on a designer chair.

Sarah followed me. She grabbed a dish towel and wet it at the sink. She came over and started wiping the dirt off my face.

“Hold still,” she said, her maternal instinct taking over.

The cool water felt good. But it also felt… insufficient.

“I went for a walk,” I said, as she scrubbed a spot of grease off my cheek.

“A walk? Jack, you look like you went to war.”

“I went back to the woods,” I told her. “Behind the old subdivision. Where the fort used to be.”

She stopped wiping. She looked at me, really looked at me. She knew about the Fort. She knew about Tommy. But to her, they were just stories I told at dinner parties. Charming, nostalgic anecdotes about the “good old days.” She didn’t know they were the bedrock of my soul.

“Is that where you got this?” She touched the tear in my suit.

“Yeah. The fence is new. I had to climb it.”

She let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-sob. “You climbed a fence? In a thousand-dollar suit?”

“I had to see it,” I said. “I had to see if it was still there.”

“Was it?”

“No,” I said. “It’s a drainage pipe now. A retention pond.”

I reached into my pocket. My hand brushed the funeral program, but I went past it. I wrapped my fingers around the yellow plastic wheel.

I pulled it out and set it on the quartz countertop.

It sat there, jagged and dirty, a piece of trash in a pristine room.

“What is that?” Sarah asked.

“A wheel,” I said. “From a Tonka truck. We buried it in 1986. For good luck.”

Sarah stared at the wheel. Then she looked at my face. She saw the tears welling up in my eyes—tears I hadn’t let fall during the service, tears I hadn’t let fall during the burial.

“Oh, Jack,” she whispered.

She wrapped her arms around my neck. She didn’t care about the mud on my jacket. She pulled my head against her chest.

“I miss him,” I choked out. The dam broke. “I miss him so much, Sarah. It’s not fair. He was fifty. We were supposed to be old men together. We were supposed to sit on porches and complain about the government.”

“I know,” she soothed, stroking my hair. “I know.”

“And I miss…” I pulled back slightly to look at her. “I miss who I was when I was with him. I miss the world we lived in.”

I gestured around the kitchen.

“This,” I said. “This is all great. I love our life. But it’s so… quiet. It’s so safe. We didn’t have much, but we had everything. And now we have everything, but it feels like…”

“Like nothing?” she asked softly.

“Like insulation,” I said. “We’re insulated from the world. We don’t feel anything anymore. We just watch it on screens.”

Sarah looked at me with sad, understanding eyes. She wasn’t a “hose water kid” like me—she grew up in the suburbs too, but she was different. More refined. But she understood loss.

“You’re grieving, Jack,” she said. “Grief makes you look backward. It makes the past look perfect and the present look empty.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But the water tasted better back then. I swear it did.”

She smiled, a sad, gentle smile. She walked to the fridge. Whirrr. Click. She filled a glass with water from the dispenser. Filtered. Chilled. Perfect.

She set it in front of me.

“Drink,” she said.

I looked at the glass. It was sweating condensation.

“I’m not thirsty,” I lied.

“Drink,” she repeated.

I took a sip. It was cold. It was wet. It tasted like nothing. It was chemically perfect H2O.

I set the glass down.

“I need to do one more thing,” I said.

I stood up. My knees popped.

“Where are you going?” Sarah asked. “You need a shower. And some antibiotic ointment on that leg.”

“I know,” I said. “Just give me a minute.”

The Communion

I walked to the sliding glass door in the breakfast nook. I unlocked it and slid it open.

The humidity rushed in again, colliding with the AC.

I stepped out onto the patio.

My backyard was nothing like the wild, overgrown yards of my youth. It was a square of perfect Zoysia grass, surrounded by a six-foot privacy fence. There were no trees to climb. There were no hidden paths. There was a Weber gas grill with a cover on it.

But in the corner, near the rose bushes, there was a spigot.

And coiled next to it, a green garden hose.

It called to me.

I stepped off the concrete patio and onto the grass. The dew was heavy now. It soaked through my socks immediately.

I walked over to the spigot.

I felt like a priest approaching an altar. This was the final ritual. This was the closure I hadn’t found at the church or the cemetery.

I knelt down in the wet grass. My suit pants were ruined beyond repair, but I didn’t care. I would burn this suit. It was the uniform of the sad man I used to be.

I reached for the handle. It was stiff with corrosion. I gritted my teeth and turned it.

Screeeeeeak.

The sound was music.

Water hissed into the hose. The green rubber snake expanded, shifting slightly in the grass as the pressure built.

I picked up the nozzle. It was a cheap plastic pistol-grip sprayer. I unscrewed it and tossed it aside. I didn’t want the “Mist” setting. I didn’t want the “Shower” setting.

I wanted the source.

I held the open end of the hose. Water sputtered out—cough, spit, cough—and then flowed clear. A steady, solid stream.

I could smell it. That specific scent of wet rubber, brass, and deep earth.

I looked up at the sky. The light pollution from the city drowned out most of the stars. But I could see one. A single, bright point of light hanging low in the west. Maybe it was Venus. Maybe it was a plane.

I chose to believe it was Tommy.

“Here’s to you, brother,” I whispered.

I lifted the hose to my lips.

The water was freezing cold. It hit the back of my throat with a shock that sent shivers down my spine.

I drank.

I drank deep, greedy gulps.

And in that moment, the years dissolved. The timeline collapsed.

We didn’t drink bottled water; we drank from the garden hose, and it tasted like freedom.

It tasted like iron. It tasted like the pennies we used to put on the railroad tracks. It tasted like the blood in my mouth after a fistfight. It tasted like the ozone of a summer storm. It tasted like August 1986.

I closed my eyes, and I wasn’t forty-nine anymore.

I was ten. I was shirtless, my skin brown from the sun. My bike was lying in the grass behind me, the wheel still spinning. Tommy was standing next to me, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, laughing.

“Your turn, Jack,” he said.

I drank until my stomach hurt. I drank until the water spilled out of the corners of my mouth and ran down my chin, soaking my shirt collar. I drank until I was drowning in memory.

For a few seconds, I wasn’t lonely. I wasn’t old. I wasn’t afraid of the future.

I was just a boy, drinking from the vein of the earth, alive and invincible.

I lowered the hose. I gasped for air, the cold water dripping from my nose.

“Thank you,” I whispered to the dark.

I let the water run for another moment, watching it pool in the grass, turning the dirt into mud.

I turned the handle. Squeak. The flow stopped.

I stayed kneeling there for a long time. The silence of the backyard returned, but it didn’t feel oppressive anymore. It felt peaceful. The crickets were singing. A dog barked in the distance—maybe Buster, maybe a ghost dog.

I stood up. I felt lighter. The crushing weight on my chest had lifted. It wasn’t gone—grief never really goes away, it just changes shape—but it was manageable now. It was something I could carry.

I picked up the plastic nozzle and screwed it back on. I coiled the hose back up.

We came home when the streetlights turned on.

I looked at the back of my house. The kitchen light was on. I could see Sarah moving around inside. She was making something. Maybe a sandwich. Maybe tea.

She was my streetlight now. She was the signal that it was time to come inside.

I walked back to the patio. I wiped my shoes on the mat, trying to get the worst of the mud off.

I slid the glass door open and stepped back into the warmth of my life.

The Aftermath

Sarah was standing at the island. She had put a frozen pizza in the oven. The smell of baking pepperoni filled the kitchen—a scent that bridged the gap between my childhood and my adulthood.

She looked up at me. She saw the water on my shirt. She saw the peace in my face.

“Better?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Better.”

“Go shower,” she said. “Pizza’s ready in ten minutes.”

I walked upstairs. My knees hurt with every step, but it was a good hurt.

I went into the master bathroom. I stripped off the ruined suit. I threw the muddy socks in the trash. I stepped into the shower.

I turned the water on hot. Not cold. I had had enough cold water for one night.

I scrubbed the clay from my skin. I watched the brown water swirl down the drain, taking the physical evidence of my journey with it.

But I knew the internal change would remain.

I got out, dried off, and put on a pair of sweatpants and an old t-shirt—a faded concert tee from 1992. It felt soft and familiar.

I went back downstairs. Sarah had the pizza on the counter, cut into square slices.

We sat there in the kitchen, eating greasy pepperoni pizza at 10:30 at night. We didn’t talk much. We didn’t need to.

I reached into my pocket—the pocket of the sweatpants where I had transferred my treasures—and pulled out the Tonka wheel.

I set it on the windowsill above the sink.

“I’m going to keep this here,” I said.

“Okay,” Sarah said.

“To remind me,” I said.

“To remind you of what?”

“To go outside,” I said. “To get lost sometimes. To drink the water.”

Sarah smiled. She reached over and squeezed my hand. Her hand was warm.

“I think that’s a good idea,” she said.

The End of the Day

Later that night, I lay in bed next to Sarah. The room was dark, the only light coming from the streetlamp filtering through the blinds.

I listened to the house settling. Creak. Pop.

I thought about the kids on the bench with their iPads. I thought about the man in the NVIDIA shirt. I thought about the boy, Leo, with his AirTag.

They were living in a different world. A world of safety and screens and constant connection.

But they would never know the specific magic of being unreachable. They would never know the thrill of being three miles from home with a flat tire and no phone, having to figure it out. They would never know the taste of freedom that comes from a green rubber hose.

I felt a pang of pity for them. But also a fierce protectiveness over my own memories.

I had lived it. We had lived it.

We didn’t have much, but we had everything.

I closed my eyes.

In the theater of my mind, the movie started to play.

It’s August. The sun is setting, painting the sky in shades of purple and bruised orange. The air is cooling down.

I’m on my bike. The wind is rushing past my ears. The baseball card in my spokes is clacking like a machine gun. Thwack-thwack-thwack.

Tommy is next to me. He’s standing on his pedals, pumping hard. He looks over at me and laughs.

“Race you to the end of the street!” he yells.

“You’re on!” I scream back.

We pedal harder. Our legs burn. Our lungs burn. We are flying. We are immortal.

Ahead of us, the streetlights flicker. Buzz. They glow amber.

We don’t stop. We just ride faster, chasing the light, riding into the forever.

I drifted off to sleep, with the taste of iron still lingering on my tongue.
THE END