The old crabapple tree is a curtain of blossoms and I circle it in my new pink sneakers. The boys from the neighborhood come out to play. The new game is wilderness survival. When the game gets heated, the boys push me; they splash mud on my sneakers and somehow, I laugh at it. We make pine needle beds to lie on. One of us comments that survival isn’t so hard. The light simmers in the yards until it dyes every house ember-purple. In the last shards of light we concern ourselves with collected pinecones, distributing their small seeds on the ground.


Summer floats into the neighborhood like a stray tree petal. My sneakers are no longer pink. The boys and I take our wilderness game into the yellow shed. When we don’t get along, the boys grab me hard by the arms and then the legs. Their yanking stops suddenly when I start to cry. I feel too old to cry and my tears sting. When I come home for dinner, my mother hands me Ivory soap and explains I need to start washing under my arms.


I climb to the top of the crabapple tree to see it all. The world is the neighborhood. The whole world is these dusky houses dipped in dark pink and orange. It sounds like the distant thuds of parents stepping out of car doors and garbage cans rolling. It smells like bark and smoke.


My mother buys me new white shoes but I never want to wear them. I circle the crabapple tree alone. The heat of summer yields to cooler, purpler evenings. The boys come outside less and less.


A brown-red bloom appears in my underpants. I no longer want to climb anything. In my head there is a new game: the boys force me into the yellow shed and I break free and they hunt me down. The trees drop brownish cherries onto the grass; I store some in a box with the pinecones and a fake arrowhead I took from the boys.


The grass turns brown-brown, the tree branches crash in the wind. My heart is a box of lifeless objects until spring comes again. And again. And again.
And again.




This fall my daughter is almost that age. She’s not one to play outside. Maybe she knows something I didn’t. I still live here with one of the boys. We painted the old shed an earthy red and I don’t like the look of it. I stand under the old crabapple tree and smoke a cigarette I took from my daughter's pink denim backpack. My legs can’t climb to the top of the old crabapple tree, but I know the light in the neighborhood is unchanged. It remains the color of bruises and longing. I blow smoke curls into the musty, apple-scented air. With the heels of my old lady clogs I drag dead pine needles together in a clump like the soft, sticky beds from our survival games.

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Charlotte Hammond is a fiction writer and copywriter living in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, the Capra Review and others. In 2021, her story “Children’s Day” appeared in an anthology published by Marshall Cavendish Singapore.