Camping Out

I wrote this in response to the prompt for the July Flash Fiction Contest for Silence and Starsong. To be fair to these characters, however, I decided that this one really deserves to be written up in long form. I’m actively outlining/plotting that one now and hope to have it done sooner rather than later. But for now, I hope you enjoy this snippet.

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“Whoa! What’s this?” Isaac’s eyes gleamed as he pulled the flashlight from the duffel bag.

“Something Papaw gave me,” Luke replied. “Well, wanted to give me before …”

Isaac winced. “Sorry. Papaw really was the best, wasn’t he?”

He could have passed for family, but in reality Issac was just one of the neighbor kids. He and Luke were inseparable every summer when Luke came to visit, so it was only natural that Luke’s grandparents became his adopted Mamaw and Papaw.

Luke took the flashlight, gently fingering the tag tied on the end with a bit of string. “For Lucas,” was scrawled in his grandfather’s unmistakeable script. Papaw always called him Luke, but, for whatever reason, gifts always came with his proper name attached.

“You wanna try it?” Luke offered. “Mamaw got some new batteries, but we weren’t sure whether they were even the right ones.”

“Sure!” Isaac took the gadget back, handling it tenderly. “Looks old, don’t it?”

“Yeah. Mamaw said she thought that maybe Papaw brought it back with him after the war.”

Isaac pointed the business end out the treefort window, toward the patch of woods that butted up against the back fence, and flicked the switch. A faint light brightened a spot in the trees. Neither of the boys seemed too impressed.

“Well it ain’t really dark yet,” Isaac said. “But it looks like it’ll cast a good, wide beam once the sun gets all the way down.”

Luke shrugged as he took the flashlight and replaced it in his campout bag. “Yeah, I guess so.” He wasn’t sure why Papaw gave him a regular, old flashlight. But still, if for no other reason, it would be special to Luke merely because it had belonged to the man whose hands had nailed up the boards of that treefort and had dunked Luke in the creek and brought him up as “my brother.”

“Here, try this,” Isaac said, tossing a bag of candy into Luke’s lap.

“What are they?”

Isaac’s family kept candy under close guard, so his ration arrived at the treefort in a ziploc bag rather than the original packaging.

“Just try it, will ya?”

Luke pulled a hard candy from the bag and placed it on his tongue. Almost instantly his mouth puckered harder than he could ever remember. Isaac flopped over on his side in laughter.

“Ain’t y’all got Warheads up north?” Isaac managed to spurt in between gasps for air. Anything beyond I-20 was “up north” and he loved to tease Luke about it.

The extreme sour taste went away quickly. Luke decided the candy wasn’t that bad and would have been fine if he’d been ready for it.

“See if I don’t just let you roll right out of the fort tonight when you’re asleep!” He threw the bag of candy back at Isaac, catching him upside the head and giving them both a laugh.

An hour later they had laid out their sleeping bags and were starting the long drift to sleep that characterized many a previous campout in the treefort.

“Hey,” Isaac whispered. “You still awake?”

“Yeah. What?”

“Well, I was just thinkin’. You don’t ‘spose J.J. will mess with us, do you?”

John Farnham, Jr.—known to everyone in town as “J.J.”—called both Luke and Isaac friends two summers ago. Now he was a classic bully. Luke had a run-in with him the week before and a big standoff that nearly ended in a fight earlier that morning. J.J. had backed down, but the threats he tossed out as he left sounded very real to Luke and more serious than ever.

“J.J. sneak out at night? Nah. His dad would give him a whoopin so bad his great-grandkids would be feelin’ it. He ain’t gonna bother us. Not tonight.”

That seemed to satisfy Isaac, the slightly younger and much smaller of the two friends. Before long there was nothing to be heard in the treefort but regular breathing. The town, likewise, had gone to sleep and a chorus of crickets chirped in the woods.

#

“Did you hear that?”

Luke woke with a start, jerking upright. “Hear what?”

“That!”

The rustling in the underbrush was soft but impossible to miss.

“It’s gotta be J.J. Let’s make a run for the house,” Isaac pleaded.

“I told you it ain’t J.J. Probably just a possum or maybe a fat squirrel. Grab that flashlight and I’ll prove it.”

Isaac fumbled in the bag and passed the chunky contraption to Luke.

“Now look,” Luke said, pressing the switch. “There’s nothin’ there. Definitely no J.J.”

The light spread across a wide patch of trees, wider than any flashlight either of them had ever seen. And brighter too, somehow, though the thing must have been half a century old. There was something else about the light that Luke couldn’t quite name.

“No,” Isaac said. “It was over there.”

Luke swung the light around. He twitched at the unexpected sight of none other than J.J., with an unmistakable armful of Roman candles.

“Shut off that light, y’all!” he whisper-shouted. “Ain’t gotta blind me and wake up the whole town too.”

Then Luke and Isaac noticed the dark thing standing over J.J. A form that suggested a broad pair of wings was visible only as long as it remained in the glow cast by Papaw’s flashlight. Terrified at what he thought he saw, Luke reflexively mashed the switch, plunging the backyard and the woods into darkness. Isaac pulled Luke to the floor as the two of them heard J.J. racing past the treefort and into the front yard, letting the gate slam behind him as he ran.

A few minutes later, safely burrowed under Luke’s bed, Isaac finally got his panting under control and ventured a question.

“What was that?”

Luke shook his head. “No idea,” he said after a moment. “But now I really wish Papaw was around to tell me about this flashlight.”