Good Friend, Cricket

Cricket always knew it was summer by the smell well before the warmth ever touched him. Softening earth erupted rich geysers of geosmin from the thawing microscopic bugs doing their seasonal maintenance. Shortly after that started, the honeysuckle began climbing and blooming on the fence behind Georgie’s house. Lightening bugs started dancing a little higher to stay above the growing grasses. By the time the first firefly blinked under the massive oak tree, Cricket was already awake.

He had no memory of sleeping. He was only aware that at the end of every spring, his eyes would open and at the end of every summer, his eyes would close. Everything in between that time was Georgie.

The back door of the house flew open and hit the house with a window rattling crack. Georgie was barreling into the backyard. It was the second day after school had ended for the summer, and the six-year-old was already shoeless and moving like a feral creature of the woods. He was holding a cardboard tube that Georgie had determined was a pirate’s spyglass.

“There you are!” Georgie shouted while pointing the spyglass at Cricket. He sounded like Cricket had only stepped away for just a few minutes and it hadn’t been almost an entire year since they had seen each other.

“There YOU are!” Cricket smiled.

“I looked around for you all winter!”

“I know. Sorry. You know I have to go away,” a hint of sadness crept into his words at the thought of Georgie being disappointed in him.

“I know that! I just wish you could stay longer. Where do you go?”

Cricket turned away to look back towards the woods beyond the fence, where some things lurk that are even older than questions. “You know, Georgie. I’m really not sure.”

Georgie accepted the response immediately. Kids his age could live next door to mysteries the way adults used cell phones. They can just let them do the work they do without needing every impossible detail and mechanism explained.

“Want to see my ship?” Georgie didn’t wait for an answer before he turned on his heels and sprinted into the woods.

Cricket followed Georgie to a large fallen maple branch. It was much more than just a branch to Georgie. As he stood on it, it became a brigantine crossing an angry sea filled with sea monsters, murderous pirates, and a particularly rude octopus named Ralph. Cricket slid seamlessly into Georgie’s world. That was the marvelous thing about children. They didn’t need to imagine something over top of the world. They had the ability to imagine straight through everything like reality was only a rough sketch waiting for the bright colors of their creativity to fill in the unfinished parts.

The branch groaned over imaginary waves and the wind tasted faintly of salt. Something massive surged beneath the sea and rocked Georgie's ship. Georgie picked up a very sword looking stick off of the ground and turned to cricket.

“Stay behind me!”

Cricket did. Saving Cricket was Georgie’s favorite thing.

#

Every summer was ripe with these familiar rhythms. Year after year, the creek behind the oak tree was an ocean, the oak tree was always a castle, clouds could have been dragons in the morning and then flying whales by dinner time. Cricket never was actually involved in the process of imagining these things into existence, but he still believed in them as fiercely as Georgie did. Arguably, even more so. When Georgie built a bridge over the creek and then invented an evil troll to live under it, Cricket avoided that bridge for a whole summer. When Georgie announced that Tuesdays were unlucky, Cricket traversed the woods more carefully on Tuesdays to make sure he didn’t trip over something. Imagination had rules that didn’t apply to adults, but Cricket made sure they applied to himself.

#

The first changes arrived too quickly. The summer Georgie turned eight, he was given a handheld game console for his birthday. For the entire first week of summer, Georgie carried it everywhere. He even carried it to the castle. Cricket sat next to him and watched him smash buttons instead of searching woods for monsters like they would usually do.

“Do you want to go hunt down some giants?” Cricket eventually asked.

“In a minute,” Georgie spoke without taking his eyes off the screen. The minute lasted about two and a half hours. When he finally looked up at cricket, he pondered, “I think the giants have giant pet squirrels.”

Cricket laughed deeply, “They absolutely do!”

They spent the entire next day tracking giant squirrel footprints in the mud along the creek. Cricket wasn’t worried that things were going to change. Not yet.

#

The summer Georgie turned ten, the tree fort they built three summers before collapsed. His dad offered to rebuild it for him, bigger and stronger than the last one.

“No. It’s ok.” Georgie shrugged before going back inside the house with his dad. Cricket stood in the splintered graveyard of the fort long after everyone went inside. He picked up the maple branch that used to be their pirate ship before it became a support for one of the interior walls. It still smelled faintly of salt air and cannon smoke. He set it down exactly where he had found it.

#

One day, the summer when Georgie was eleven, a robin went to land on Cricket's shoulder. The bird startled the both of them as it attempted to touchdown but then simply continued moving through Cricket. It was like he was made of fog for a moment. The bird caught itself before it hit the ground and flew off somewhere near Cricket’s belly button. Georgie had a worried expression on his face. Even though he was struck with fear as well, Cricket looked at him and smiled reassuringly.

“What a rude little bird!” They both laughed it off.

#

The summer Georgie was twelve, they didn’t go to the creek one single time. The dragon flies seemed to wait, ready to be chased and plucked out of the sky. The toads seemed quieter, no doubt saving their voices for when Georgie was closer. Even the old snapping turtle that scared them both seemed in an even worse mood than usual that summer. Georgie just stayed inside. Cricket could occasionally hear him laughing from open windows. He could sometimes hear the muffled electric sound of his school friends' voices floating out of headsets while noises of explosions and revving engines came out of his tv. Sometimes, at night, Cricket watched the blue glow from Georgie’s bedroom window remain on long after the lightning bugs went to sleep.

Cricket still sat under the oak tree every day. Just in case.

#

At thirteen, Georgie stopped filling the empty spaces with his imagination and the monsters stopped roaming between the trees. By fourteen, he stopped looking at the woods altogether. Fifteen year old Georgie came and went without ever glancing to the clearing between the backyard and the woods where Cricket always met him. It wasn’t because he couldn't see Cricket anymore. It was because he stopped thinking about looking for him.

#

Over those few lonely years, Cricket realized that him disappearing wasn’t like a hard breath blowing out a candle. It was a shared gradual forgetting. A piece by piece dismantling. One day, he couldn’t whistle anymore. A few days after that, he completely forgot the song he liked to whistle too. One time he went to pick up a stone to skip it across the creek, but he couldn’t remember which hand he was better at it with. When he leaned over the water, his reflection arrived a heartbeat later than he did. He tried to smile at himself, but what looked back at him seemed like eyes and a mouth that didn’t belong to him.

One night, near the end, he was sitting under the oak tree and thinking about Georgie. He tried to remember the first thing he ever called Cricket the first time they saw each other. He didn’t think it had always been Cricket. He could have sworn there was something else first. The memory left him before he could fully embrace it.

#

It was a bright and perfect morning at the end of August when Georgie left for college. His parents couldn’t stop crying as they loaded the last of his things into the moving truck. All three of them walked past the backyard and to the old oak tree in the woods. Georgie wrapped his arms around it and hugged it without really knowing why he was doing it.

“I used to play here all the time,” he said with his words catching in his throat.

His mother smiled at him, “You practically lived out here every summer.”

“I… I barely remember any of it.”

With all that was left of him, Cricket stood a few feet away and as quiet as a breeze, he said, “I will remember it all for both of us.”

Georgie shivered and for the briefest of moments he looked deeper into the woods. Cricket almost believed he would stay and they would play again. There was a spark of hope inside of Cricket that he would grow strong again and everything would be the way it used to be. He could be a part of the woods and a part of George's life if Georgie would just come to his senses and run for the creek and keep Cricket safe from pirates like he always did. But, the moment was over as fast as it happened. Cricket watched the three of them walk back to the house, he watched them disappear into the moving truck as the doors shut behind them, and then he saw the truck vanish around the corner.

The dust settled and an oppressive silence filled the woods. Cricket was all of a sudden hopelessly tired. He leaned back against the great oak and slumped heavily down to the ground under the shade of the tree. The very last thought he had before he drifted off to wherever he goes when he sleeps away the time between summers was, “Summer was over, and so were we.”