Fiction – Lisa Thornton

The knights of New Hampshire

Our grandfather taught us to identify trees by the shape of their leaves. If we hold out our cousin arms, we see patterns of elm, maple and oak on our skin. Maine and Massachusetts meet in the dim light. Who will conquer who this summer?

Worn paths lead to abandoned cabins in a ring like spikes on the head of a thistle. We divide into factions and use the dilapidated structures as bases. Water-stained calendars from the 1940s hang from nails in the walls and chipped ceramic bowls fill the cabinets. We sit cross-legged on plank floors planning our attacks, white stuffing exploding from mortal wounds in upholstered couches so laden with dust our eyes itch and water if we bounce on them. 

We fight like our parents with their menthols and plastic cups. Practicing for when slaughter comes at the hand of a sharp sentence, we slice at the air with sword branches and fling balls of mud with rocks rolled surreptitiously inside them. We know the true nature of family. We know how to play. We were taught by the parries and the starve-outs and the silences. The tricksters and the go-for-the-throats.

We hide in hollowed tree trunks and beneath crumbling porches with slugs and caterpillars and earthworms. We hold our breath. The oldest of us, in from the coast, steers us away from the refrigerator tossed down the hillside. When one of the twins get scared and starts to cry, we bury him in a pile of fallen leaves. We hide behind stacked towers of empty Michelob cans and jump from disemboweled mattresses, ignoring the far-off voices when surely it is not dinnertime yet. We strip twigs from a birch limb and peel off its bark. We kneel, circles of moisture growing on the knees of our jeans. We tap shoulders one at a time, bestowing power, demanding allegiance, promising fealty. We give each other new names.

We use hub caps as shields and mix toxic teas of mud and clover, dandelion and sand in upturned, dog-chewed frisbees. We wriggle under foundations. We ride horses made from bent bicycle tires and plywood and strips of moldy tarp. We pry splinters from our fingers and lick blood like soft serve dripping down the sides of our hands. We drink from the stream and catch glimpses of our foes darting through shadows. We sling broken bricks at their chests and shoot arrows of greenstick and sharpened slate at their cheeks.

The voices reach us again and we swat them away like mosquitoes or biting flies but they return, landing in our eyelashes and buzzing our ears and we are pulled from the dappled and into the monochrome without a clear winner, with no trumpets to declare victory, and someone’s mother says let’s get all of you together for a picture and we stand in the cut grass squirming hip to hip with enemies whose hair we have yanked and faces we have slashed. We blink at the adults lined up next to the porch, sipping and smoking and shifting and chuckling. Alright kids, someone’s dad barks while holding a camera up to his eye and they all chant in unison-say cheese.