A Little Wooden Shack

Peter Chong

            “You gettin’ off here?”

            “Yeah.  How much for the trip?”

            “Twenty dollars,” the cab driver said.  I handed him the money.

“Hey..,” the driver said.  His eyes quizzically scanned me, up and down.  “Nothin’.”  And with that I shut the door, and the yellow cab drove away down the smooth paved highway, as the engine sound died with the ever expanding distance it made from me.  I took a breath as the cab disappeared down a hill, and I straightened my ruffled grey shirt as I shook my waking legs from somber sleep into prickly life.  Trees lined both sides of the road, and wilderness beyond melted into beautiful, untouched solitude.  I kneeled down and picked up my dull brown, sagging bag and heard the shaking of cans, metal, plastic and glass.  The road was empty now.  The sun was just beginning to set, and orange barely tinted the sky.  I pivoted on my heels and stared at the downward slope of semi-kept nature and hurriedly strode off of the pavement and onto the grass.  I trudged along, as shadows played a little dance underneath the treetops and I mentally applauded the performance.  The grass grew wilder as I moved on, and old, dead logs, flowers, weeds, and more grew with fervid excitement.  I stopped.  There was a fallen log in front of me, the mid-section caved in.  I hung my arms from the straps of my bag and hopped over it.  The grass was shorter.  A path was there.  At the end, another tree, not yet fallen but laden with injuries and bruises.  Next to it sat an overturned truck on its side, red with rust, with patchy, flaking, dark green paint.  I floated down on flying feet and swung my arms out to touch it.  I touched the window.  There was a flower growing in it.  A red sort of flower.  And it grew on brown dirt and red stains on the cracked window inside.  I felt the side of my head, and the dull thuds of that evening came back to me.  

            It was the night of a new moon.  No light about except the stars, and that light was wanting of some strength.  That light was pretty to watch, and a shooting star even flashed across the sky, but that had done me in.  I admit to having lost my senses (maybe a little too much to drink) but the stars were gorgeous that night, and I wanted to follow the shooting star.  So I turned the wheel and then the world went spinning, and the stars started to cheer, and I started to panic.  Then the flash of pain.  Then the world of darkness.  Until I woke up again in a mat of leaves and soft grass, under the roof of a wooden shack.

            Light trickled through the leaves atop the shack, and then I felt my head:  bandaged.  I rolled my glazed eyes over to the closed door, and through the cracks, a shadow danced a glacial dance, and then the shadow stopped.  The door swung up, without a creek, and my eyes caught the sight of a beautiful man, and in his rugged hands, he held a bowl which gave a breathy breath of steam into the air, as cloudy billows buffeted around the little wooden shack, and then my nose caught a whiff of it.  That beautiful man gave me a beautiful thing.

“Breakfast,” I wheezed, and my throat closed up as the smell turned sour.  My head knocked back into the grass, and then I saw the man shake his head.  My vision cleared.  His long dirty hair limply rested on his gaunt shoulders, and his sunken eyes stared at me for a moment.  He put the bowl down on the ground, and came to me, and reached for me.  He touched my head and then I fell, into another darkness.

It went like that another day, another day, and another day.  And on the last I woke up in my bed, at home, with my dad looking at me, a little bemused.

It took me a year till I could remember what had fully happened, and when I did, I called the cab and asked to go to that random place.

And then I was here again.  And again.  And again.  I suppose I have visited some six or seven times in six or seven years.

And so I finished my reminiscence, and briskly wandered past the truck, and behind it was that little shack, old not yet abandoned.

I shouldered off my pack and emptied it out upon the land:  drinks and food and old collections spread across the grass, and from the shack came that beautiful man.

--

Peter Chong was born in May 1st, 1998, and attends the Academy of American Studies, a small high school in Queens, New York. “A Little Wooden Shack” is this year’s winner of the Schools Project Ernst Pawel Student Writing Award.