By: Taylor Lammert

Short Story - Second Place

Vincennes University’s “The Best of Autumn Voices” 2019-2020

We must have built a hundred tree houses by the end of that summer.

Brandon and I made the trek every day to a lot a block away filled with refuse. Maybe there was a house in there somewhere, a life being lived, but if there was, we never found it. We loaded each other’s arms with splintered boards, frayed lengths of old rope, multicolored glass shards clouded with age and carried armful after armful to the backyard of the duplex across the street from the apartment complex we both lived in. We wedged boards in between branches to form shaky platforms, used the rope to fashion primitive pulley systems, hung the glass shards from limbs to create colorful decorations that caught the light as well as the skin of our fingers.

Every day, we built a new treehouse in that same tree, knowing that, come tomorrow morning, it would be gone. The cranky old woman who lived in the inhabited side of the duplex would, without fail, destroy it, muttering to herself the whole way. We knew this. We always did. Even so, we kept going until school started again, making it harder to find time in the day to be kids.

On the walks between our latest build and the tree it would call home, we would chatter about how today’s treehouse would be even cooler than yesterday’s. We didn’t think to be sad when that old woman tore them down, only ever looked forward to how we could make it better the next day.

When the sun set in the evening, we knew my mom would be wondering where we were, but his mom would not. So, when it started to get dark, we sat on the sidewalk outside the living room window of my mom’s and my apartment. Every once in a while, the yellow light spilling through the glass would be interrupted by my mom’s shadow as she peeked through the curtains to check on us.

Someone in the neighborhood played bagpipes, and we always listened while we sat. Years later, I would hear “Skye Boat Song” and be dunked head first back into that time in my life, and it would send a shock through my system like cold water down my spine. Brandon, I would remember, and I would wonder what ever happened to him, if he was planning to become an architect or an engineer or any one of those things he used to babble to me about on our walks that summer. And, it would surprise me with how much it hurt to remember him. I moved away from that shoddy block of poorly managed apartments. Did he? Would he ever?

For now, though, we were only kids, and nothing hurt except the splinters and glass shards we picked from our fingers, and “Skye Boat Song” only made me happy. Eventually, the woman in the duplex emerged from her back door in a robe, curlers, and slippers, muttering to herself. I didn’t think to wonder until later why she never stopped us from building. Had she ever come outside to yell at us, we would have found something else to do. If she had wanted to, she could have. I don’t think she did, though. Maybe some lonely part of her liked knowing we were there. Maybe tearing down the treehouses was a way to make sure we came back.

Maybe it was that same lonely part that lives in all of us that drove the bagpipe player to open their windows for us to hear. I wonder sometimes if they ever got to play for an audience bigger than scruffy kids sitting on the sidewalk across the neighborhood. I doubt it; they were kind of terrible. But, still, I hope they did.

Perhaps that lonely part was what drove Brandon and I together, what drove the other neighborhood kids to catch on and join us in listening, all of us watching the death of the day’s treehouse to the soundtrack of the bagpipes, like the strangest funeral you could ever see. It was, maybe, what drove all of us to everything we did that summer.

We were all people orbiting around each other, a kind of congruence in our lives that Brandon and I weren’t old enough to comprehend. The kids on that block travelled in a big pack, and we always converged at my apartment because everyone knew my mom would feed them and that I would share my toys. I didn’t know why everyone wanted to come over to my house then, not really. I just figured they probably liked my dog, and, I mean, I did have the best toys. But, I didn’t understand until we moved into a different neighborhood where kids were eager to go back home at night and more parents than mine watched through windows. I had someone looking out for me, and that wasn’t always true for everyone else.

There was a kind of solidarity then that I can still remember so clearly. We were people. Just people. Just kids. Just grumpy old ladies. Just bagpipe players. Some of us moved, and some of us didn’t. We will grow up to be scientists, restaurant managers, architects, janitors, receptionists, teachers, pharmacists, to lead wildly different lives. But, back then, we were all the same. For a split second in time, there we all were.

“Skye Boat Song” always takes me right back there, to the apartment and the street outside it. So do treehouses and garbage-filled lots and bubbles and tire swings and light-up shoes and silhouettes from behind curtains. Sometimes it hurts, and sometimes it doesn’t. One thing I know for sure is that fate or God or whatever may be out there rips us apart in terrifying ways and flings us away from each other, but what matters is that we were there.

For a moment or an eternity or for just a few seconds, here we all are.