Behind the red barn where light doesn’t reach and where many an impatient boy has anxiously laid in the grass during games of hide and seek, heart thudding in the dirt like footsteps, and where many of the same boys have urinated, giggling at their courage, their bodies hidden so cunningly that they had time to pee, behind the red barn where the grass grows deep and prickly weeds are concealed like landmines, there rests a long wooden ladder.

The ladder has waited for uncounted years, collecting nameless scars and paint drops in anticipation of beingtheold ladder, the only one the boys could trust for missions deep into enemy territory. It has given them the steps on which to build wooden fortresses, castles in the canopy. It has rested against skinny birches and wobbled, making a boy’s heart clutch and freeze twenty feet above the ground, though it never meant to.

In fact, if given the choice, it would glue itself to every vertical surface it touched and hold fast for those boys until the end of summer, or they asked him to move.

Once, during a ragged and breathless pursuit, a boy desperately threw the ladder in the air and then had to drag it over barbed wire fencing. The sharp metal cut deep ridges into its grain, and it probably wanted to scream obscenities in its own ancient, knotted language. But it kept quiet, because that’s how it has always been, and because red and blue lights were marching across the surface of the whole world and the ladder surely did not want to be placed in a cold, dry evidence room to be prodded and dusted down by strange men.

 It trusts the boys to akeep it safe. It trusts them much in the same way that even though it lies next to the aluminum ladder, the lighter one, the shinier one, and even though it is missing the bottom rung and its paint shelf snapped off centuries ago, every time the boys see those cuts and urine stains and splashes of paint they think “this thing will hold us.” 

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