We called it the Witches Hand. I think Davy came up with the name. Looked like nothing in daylight, but if you saw the silhouette at dusk you’d see why: Short stump like a gnarled wrist sticking out of the hillside, the five big branches stretching from the bowl like fingers, twisted and big-knuckled, loosely cupped above a palm. Easy to climb. Places to sit. Good view. Everything you’d want from a tree.

We knew the country all about the way kids do; every hole and tussock, every tree, every hiding-place. We were closer to it, often, crawling on our bellies, noses in the grass, fingers under every stone, eyes staring into every dark place. We knew the quarry, the marshy patches, where the rusty hulks of cars rotted under summer growths of brush and bracken and where the mine waste was tipped into black conical hills. And we had names for everything.

Davy came up with most of them, Linnie the rest. Sam and Iz and me barely made the list at all, the three of us trailing far behind in inventiveness. The three hills were Dragon, Safeside and Cooter. Dragon was like a ridged back, stony and cruel, and tucked down low lay the fold of one wing. Safeside was a sheer drop one way, but the other was a smooth slide we rolled down until we were dizzy and our hair and clothes were full of grass and earth. I can’t recall why we named the other one Cooter, but it must have made some sense to us at the time. It looked just like the kind of hill you might draw when you were very small, straight up and down and round on top. But it had a rusty stream that trickled sluggishly through mud and over rounded rocks, which we were warned never to drink of. So that was Poisonwell.

In mist, I remember, we went down to the Borrows. The clouds had sunk, tired and still they hugged the valley, fading the day. The air was wet and cold, filled with tiny drops of ice-water that pricked the skin and everything smelt of damp and rot and autumn leaves dying. Linnie found the shell of one leaf. The ghost of a leaf it looked like, pale and fragile as she twirled it in her fingers. She put her eye to it and stared at me through it.

The Borrows folded into white, waiting for us.

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This story is meant to weave back and forth from past to present.
Someone has died.
Children's games involved somehow.

updated Jan 25 by seldom