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Adventure Fantasy Drama

Ninety minutes west of home and it’s a different world. Suburbia becomes Happy Valley, where cows proudly outnumber people and traffic lights only exist “in town.” Roads meander along the paths of streams with names like “Honey Creek” and “Spruce Run,” a fair number of which have their source on “Jack’s Mountain.” The air is clear in the country. Each night the sky reminds you that the stars have not forgotten our little Earth. Each day whispers that the past is not so far away as it seemed before sunrise.

I wasn’t even out of the car before it hit me. The door opened, and country air rushed in to replace conditioned air.

Back home, a mere seventy-five miles east, summer is idling cars and patched asphalt and freshly trimmed grass. Here, livestock roam, wild flowers bloom, and trees stretch their boughs over the valley with fingerprints of hemlock, maple, cedar, ash, and oak. Here, the past is waiting in the sights, the sounds, the smells.

Rose and Katherine had been anxious to see Grandma since their Christmas visit—Another six months had passed, and an hour-and-a-half drive had proven nigh insurmountable once again—but for that moment I lost track of being Dad and became Little Mikey again. It sounds crazy, I’m sure, but the mixture of manure and pollen and leaves and…and something else…was unlike any other. It wasn’t just a fingerprint but also a timestamp. It rolled back the calendar.

Cheering, the girls ran off to see whether Momma Cat had birthed yet another litter of kittens in the back yard. They knew better than to touch. My wife Grace was climbing the steps, calling out, “Hi!” as the screen door opened ahead of her. I was a kid again and nowhere near any of it.

Not even a teenager. I’m another ten miles deeper into the country, where people live in villages with names like “Dogtown” and “Jim’s Hollow” (where you don’t go home, you go out the Holla). Dad and I have left the trailer. We’re across Laurel Creek, up the hill and deep in the forest where the world is all old growth, cow pies, and that elusive something else. It’s time for our adventure. We’ve got the swords that we cut and sanded and nailed together. I have my shield, with burlap straps nailed in place to grip. Next weekend we’ll paint them and make them look cool—except we don’t; we never do—but this weekend is too perfect to spend preparing.

“Orc!” I scream, bringing my sword down on the branch of a dead tree.

Dad laughs. “This one’s big! It must be an ogre!”

His larger sword, also of plywood, crashes through what had been alive a few years ago but now exists as part of the forest clutter.

His laugh is infectious. It will be until I turn thirteen and he decides that, as a teenager, I am embarrassed by him. Dad laughs, I laugh. He calls me Buddy. We kill monsters together.

“Goblin!” I charge a fallen log and swipe at one of the branches still thrust upward like a cowlick. A satisfying SNAP replies, but I continue on, crying, “Shield bash!” and charging through a tangle of low-hanging branches. Leaves brush my face as I barge through. I am imprinted with scent of the green.

“Watch out for those logs,” Dad calls from behind, his tone cautionary but still delighted. “Bees live in fallen logs.”

Also snakes, I think.

“Also snakes,” he adds.

I laugh again, alive and reveling in this weekend in the slanting sun with the man I think of as my buddy. He often makes it clear that he isn’t just my friend, but that he thinks it is special that we can be friends as well as father and son. Not everybody gets to be both. It never occurs to me that a clock might ticking that counts down to the moment he arbitrarily decides that we can’t be either anymore.

“Wait,” Dad says. His tone tells of something momentous about to happen. “I hear something big from that clearing.”

I come around the shield wall I just busted through, eyes alight and seeing fantasy forest around us. There is treasure in these woods. Today I’m sure we will discover it.

He leads the way, but I am never far behind. At the top of the hill lies a broad field the farmer never plants. Unseen cows leave regular deposits while I sleep late on summer mornings, leaving it ripe but deserted. The grass has grown past my knees. The afternoon sun shines down, baking all of it.

“What’s out there?” I ask.

“I think it was a dragon,” Dad says. “We have to be careful. We need to get across, but we’ll be sitting ducks if it catches us in the open.”

We walk along the edge of the clearing. A series of flat-topped rock piles create a scattershot wall between us and the open ground. A year later, as I watch my relationship with Dad sour, I will flee to these rocks and spend afternoons with my friend Sheri. She hides her cigarettes in the crevasses between the rocks because her mother would never find them all the way out here. I never work up the courage to kiss her.

“Can you cast a spell?” Dad asks.

I cheer, but I do it quietly. Dragons have very good hearing. “Invisibility!”

Dad nods. “Good idea. You’re high enough level to get us both, right?”

Proudly, even smugly, I nod. Of course I am. And I know the rules like the back of my hand. “I’ll cast invisibility, 10-foot radius.”

“Okay. Do you know how big a ten-foot radius is? Because we’ll have to stay close, even if monsters show up.” He sketches a circle that I take to be a ten-foot radius. It seems pretty big. “And remember, they’ll still be able to hear us. Invisible doesn’t mean silent.”

I arch my fingers and thrust out my thumb like the wizard on the cover of Tomb of Horrors. Then some magic words. I approximate Merlin from Excalibur, “An-owl-nah-thrack…goo-thoss-be-thud…dock-teeyel…ne-yen-thee…”

Finishing with a flourish, I look to Dad to make sure the spell came off right.

“Good job,” he says. He stands straighter, secure in the fact that no creature of fantasy forest can see us. “Let’s go.”

We enter the clearing. The dragon is somewhere overhead, but we both understand that we have to look down as well as up. There are dangers, and not all of them of the imaginary sort. Snakes live in the tall grass. There are also the large, brown ovals that the cows left behind while I dreamed of hideous monsters and glittering treasures. The air is redolent with the odor, but finding one always happens just before a foot comes down.

Step by step, yard by yard, we cross the clearing. On the far side is just a little bit of forest before the sharp drop back to the creek. I feel an urgent pang bordering on despair. If we don’t find the treasure on the other side, we will go home empty-handed. I glance back at the trees behind us, wondering whether it might have been concealed in the crevasses between the rocks. 

Just before we reach the trees, Dad looks up. He may be attempting to look fear-stricken, but he mainly looks excited. “Oh, no!”

I look up into the brilliant blue sky. An early afternoon sun forces me to raise a hand to shield my eyes.

He exclaims, “Invisibility doesn’t protect us from being smelled, either!”

“I don’t see anything!”

“It’s coming out of the sun, Bud. RUN!”

We race the last few feet, leaping into the cover of the trees as dragonfire roars across the clearing behind us. We put our backs to a pair of white ash. I will always remember the feel of that rough bark through my shirt. I press hard against it. The smell of bark and leaves fills my nostrils but to my mind there is only the wave of heat and the way the air becomes sterile in the wake of it. When I turn to peer back at the clearing, the bark rubs my smooth cheek.

“I think it’s gone,” I say.

“It probably thinks it cooked us,” Dad agrees. “Let’s go.”

We resume our expedition. We approach the other side of the hill. The terrain cants downward. Later this same summer Dad will bring me up here for The Talk. He will explain to me how men and women make babies, list off a half-dozen dirty names for genitalia, and then—in a bizarre aside that will trouble me much more than how my penis works—he will diverge from the risks of foot fetishes and toe fungus to explain that Black people are perfectly all right but gays are an abomination to God and will burn in hell. It takes me years, and at least one close friendship, to unlearn that one. At least he’ll get the penis part mostly right.

“Do you think you can make it down the slope?” Dad asks.

“You told me it was too steep,” I say, inwardly thrilled by the prospect.

“You’re bigger this year. If you think you can make it, we can go home this way.”

I nod a little nervously. We leave behind the manure and the pollen and the fragrant leaves and descend for the creek. The scent of the water rises to greet us, but it gets lost in Dad’s frustration when the steep slope breaks my confidence. What had been a fun afternoon crashes against failed expectations, surely not for the first time but for the first time that I will remember. He has to help me, and that means that I failed. We found no treasure in fantasy forest, and I know that dreams of ice cream at the Old Country Store must never be vocalized. I don’t realize yet that we will never paint our wooden swords or my shield, that this summer morning is an ending as well as a beginning.

A couple decades later, Mom asked, “You okay, Hon?”

I started at the sound of her voice. For a moment I was disoriented, looking down at a woman who had been tall as the trees an instant ago. Her hair turned gray when I wasn’t looking, but her eyes were brighter now. The last scent—the something else—registered in my mind, and I said, “I was just smelling the creek.”

She smiled and shook her head. She knew there was more to the truth. Same as she knew that, if I wasn’t telling her, then it was about him.

“Daddy!” Katherine the four-year-old cried. “Momma Cat had kittens!”

“There are six,” ten-year-old Rose reported. “But I shouldn’t ask if we can take one home.”

I want to make wooden swords with you and kill imaginary monsters, I thought. I realized that it was time for my quippy reply to Rose. She was staring at me, awaiting it. It was our cadence. But I couldn’t speak. My throat felt full. Unexpectedly, tears threatened to rim my eyes. Even my mind rebelled; all I could think was, I will not walk away from you, no matter your age, no matter what specters arise in my imagination.

All I could do was smile at the girls, at my wife still standing by the screen door, and finally back down towards Mom, who reminded me most of all that time is only escapable in the briefest, sweetest of moments.

Tears were going to well; there was no avoiding it. I craned my neck as if I had heard something in the brilliant blue sky. Maybe something coming out of the sun. I had to shield my eyes, and if I rubbed them when I looked away, there was nothing strange about that.

Mom watched without speaking, seeing everything just like always.

“The creek takes you back, don’t it?” she asked as we reached the porch steps. “I know sometimes I smell something, and it feels like I’m right there again.”

Already halfway up the steps, the girls sniffed the air dramatically and then broke into cheers. Screaming a delighted, “Chocolate chip cookies!” they vanished across the threshold.

Grace watched them disappear. She was smiling, too, something that wasn’t as easy to make happen as it had been ten years ago. “They talked about your cookies all the way here, Mom. They were hoping you’d made a batch.”

“Grandma’s secret recipe,” I said softly.

Mom still wore a broad smile. She looked at me as if all of this—the creek and the cookies—had been the same topic of conversation. “I’m glad you guys could make it. I’ve been so excited to see you.”

September 28, 2020 20:05

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21 comments

Lani Lane
01:21 Oct 06, 2020

Wow, Ray! I'm so glad we connected because reading stories like this reminds me why Reedsy is so wonderful. The imagery you presented here was incredibly vivid. I find myself diving into the smells of trees in the countryside, the sounds of running water, etc. Also, this part was just heartwarming: Also snakes, I think. “Also snakes,” he adds. I'm close to my dad and reading your story truly made me emotional. I think you also nailed the sour parts of a parent/child relationship, especially when it comes to opposing views. Tha...

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Ray Dyer
02:52 Oct 06, 2020

Thank you so much for your kind words - you made my whole week with this! I look forward to your future stories, as well!

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Lani Lane
02:52 Oct 06, 2020

Of course! :) Thank you!

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Sapphire 🌼
22:57 Dec 10, 2020

Hello again Ray! I have a habit of checking out the stories of people who check out mine, so here I am! Can I just start off by saying, the way you describe things, and the way your words have a flow, is just so amazing. The imagery (as Leilani said) was incredibly vivid. It feels like you're in the story, in the moment, and like your experiencing what happened. I'm so astounded by the way you captured everything! Keep writing!

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Ray Dyer
00:40 Dec 11, 2020

Thank you so much, Sapphire! Much appreciated!

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Molly Leasure
01:35 Oct 07, 2020

I think my favorite parts of this story, aside from the realistic and painful bonding/unbonding of the MC and his father, are the sentences that provide us with a look into the years after this memory. I.E the whole paragraph that comes after this line, "Later this same summer Dad will bring me up here for The Talk..." I adore the way you did that. It gives your MC SO much voice! I also love the fluidity between the memories and the present moment. It reads so well and, sorry for saying this xD, it made me imagine it as, say, a Disney pr...

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Ray Dyer
02:07 Oct 07, 2020

LOL - Thank you SO MUCH! That's a beautiful way to see it, and I'm so thrilled that it worked for you! I'm still laughing at the "Hear me out!" I totally get what you're saying, and it absolutely works for me. I'll take it! Thanks again. D&D is a pretty huge part of my childhood and my life, so it tends to creep in from place to place and time to time, at least now that it's "cool" to play...

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Molly Leasure
02:39 Oct 07, 2020

Haha! I'm glad it works for you! I'm a film major...so, I kind of see everything written as a movie. Hey! Me too. I still play D&D. I'm a really big fan of the game, so it was just awesome to see it sneaking into your writing :). (I've always thought it was cool so, psh.)

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Ray Dyer
02:45 Oct 07, 2020

That's so cool, and I remember seeing "scene breaks" in your story, "Sweet Dorin." I'm on hiatus from playing for the moment, for the first time since I learned to read. I ran a game for a group the same group of friends for about thirty years, the whole "Generation X makes a surrogate family out of their friends" thing. But events have conspired to take us apart, and we're still trying to figure out schedules now that a significant portion of the group is three hours behind the rest of us... Thanks again, SO MUCH, for taking the tim...

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Molly Leasure
00:32 Oct 08, 2020

Ahhhh, well that's a bummer! I hate how hard it is to get a game going sometimes. Some people can be ready for it in half an hour and some people need days to make one character...I'll never understand what all they're doing xD. And, time zones make it hard, too! I usually just play with my dad and brother, which makes it easier for me haha Me too! I'll be reading your new story soon :)

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Powerful, nostalgic story. It's truly astonishing how much a single smell can remind one of! The detailed descriptions of the settings were absolutely great. The part mentioning "The Talk" was so hilarious it nearly had me gasping for air. Great job; I'm definitely looking forward to reading more from you! :D

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Ray Dyer
03:48 Oct 21, 2020

Thank you so much!

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Vicky S
03:46 Oct 09, 2020

Hi Ray, even though I don't live in America, the countryside setting feels like home to me. It was very descriptive, involving all the senses. Living in South Australia you could almost have been describing the Adelaide Hills. You showed that little Mikey's relationship with his dad was very special as they hunted the orcs and the dragon. I enjoyed the ending with the chocolate chip cookies and also how you were able to write between his thoughts and memories.

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Ray Dyer
14:27 Oct 09, 2020

Thank you so much, Vicky! I would love to see the hills you mentioned someday; they sound beautiful. I'm glad the ending worked for you - I fell in love with the idea that Grandma was making her own "scent memories" with the kids, on purpose. Clever grandma...

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Vicky S
00:22 Oct 10, 2020

You're welcome

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Vanessa Marczan
05:03 Oct 08, 2020

Hey Ray, whoa, I bow down to a master. Gorgeous. A few years ago my husband and I drove from Miami all the way along the coast and deep south over to Houston and while I am sure this is probably set elsewhere, I was having *flashbacks* of the countryside, and the wide open spaces and little houses and imagining all the people who lived there. Thank you for bringing this back to me. Your words are wonderful, the way you capture feelings and how the story unfolds is almost cinematic. Thank you for writing this and sharing it with us all.

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Ray Dyer
19:01 Oct 08, 2020

Thank you so much - I can't express how much it means to me to read what you just wrote. I've always wanted to drive down the East Coast to Florida, but the opportunity just hasn't come along. Maybe some day. I think the chance to drive through all those small town (even though I've spent my life in one small or another) would be so amazing. Thank you again; you really touched me with what you said. I'll try to live up to it!

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Jade Lu
23:35 Oct 07, 2020

I love how artfully this story was written. It is commendable how easily you were able to switch from past to present. The story is simple yet complicated and I find it to be a unique take on the prompt. A majority of the story described an experience the narrator had playing with his father. You were able to drop little nuggets of information that allow the reader to come to the conclusion you wanted them to without writing everything outright. The story held many detailed descriptions and it almost felt as if I was in the woods playing too...

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Ray Dyer
02:57 Oct 08, 2020

Thank you, Jade! I appreciate your kind words! I'm still kind of feeling my way around how "married" to the prompt we need to be. On one hand, I'm building stories around them, and they wouldn't work as written if the prompt was removed, but at the same time, I didn't want to be so devoted to it that I ended up with a whole thesaurus of synonyms for "smell." I've got my fingers crossed that I'm "doing it right!"

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19:18 Oct 04, 2020

I love this. The complicated relationships between parents and their children are so interesting to read about. And I loved the descriptions of the woods and home. Reminds me of growing up in the woods behind my house as a kid. I didn’t find any grammatical errors. And it looks like this is your first story so welcome. Way to start it off !

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Ray Dyer
20:15 Oct 04, 2020

Thank you so much for your kind words! This might be work of fiction, but it's still very deeply personal to me. I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thank you so much for taking the time to leave some thoughts. You might leave the woods, but they never really leave you!

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