Free We the Animals by Justin Torres Page A

the telephone cables, and somewhere we had a crow calling.
    Manny said, "There's white magic and there's black magic," and we believed him.
    Lately, Manny was always trying to explain to Joel and me about God. He led us out into the woods and had us hunt for mushrooms, poisonous mushrooms, put on earth by God to work his black magic. There were white mushrooms with oily black undersides and flat, rippled mushrooms clinging to rotted-out logs, and mushrooms that puffed out a yellow smoke of spores when squeezed, but none of them contained God's black magic, and then the last of the light was gone, and all was dark.
    We were cold, but we wouldn't go home yet. There had been other children earlier; they kept separate from us, but we heard them playing in the street, and we heard as they were called inside one by one for supper. I was afraid of the dark, but no one knew; I'd never spoken the fear. I was afraid of black magic; I was afraid of poison—and when Manny and Joel decided to see who could throw the rubber ball hard enough to break the window of the Grices' camper, which had been parked in the same spot for as long as we could remember, two wheels holding up the back and the front supported by a stack of grayed lumber—I was afraid we'd be punished, but I kept my mouth shut.
    The ball thudded against the glass and rolled back toward where we crouched at the edge of the woods. A light flicked on in a back room of the house.
    "They can't see shit out here, they can't see us."
    We waited, and after a short time the light shut.
    "Use a rock this time," Joel said to Manny.
    "Let's just wait a minute, or else they'll get suspicious."
    We crouched in the dirt and smelled the air. With the backs of our hands, we rubbed life into the tips of our noses. We sucked back snot. After a while Joel mumbled, "It's fucking cold," because someone had to say the obvious so that the other two could ignore him, and in this way we knew that no one wanted to go home. A while after that, Manny said, "White magic is like rabbits in hats and shit, card tricks, whatever."
    The earth was hard and cool where we crouched, just damp enough to stick to our knees and the balls of our hands. The dirt squeezed up shut in the winter and softened in the summer, and autumn dirt was my favorite dirt, like cooled black coffee grinds. Black magic.
    "Black magic is voodoo, snake-charming, poison," Manny said. "You could kill someone with black magic."
    Manny threw the rock, and then we were running, at the full speed of terror, along the edge of the woods, running, running, running, falling down and catching our breath, with the sound of the shattering glass playing over and over in our minds, the sound of permanence, the delightful, shocking sound of damage done.
    We turned back and watched the Grices' house to see if we were being followed, and sure enough the Grices' son, the headbanger, appeared—two years older than Manny and stick thin. He walked down the middle of the street, swinging a flashlight at his side. When he came to the spot where we had drawn our chalk circle, he stopped and ran his light along the circle's outside edge. He raised the light higher in the air so he could see the drawing in its entirety. Then he kept walking down the road toward the dead end where we crouched at the woods' edge.
    "Boys," he sang, "boyyyys."
    Manny got up and walked to the log that marked the end of the road and sat, so that the headbanger would see Manny when he arrived—see that Manny wasn't hiding. Joel and I followed, swiping the dirt from our knees and rubbing our palms.
    "Three dogs on a log," the boy said and swept the light back and forth across us. We shielded our eyes. The Dead End sign glowed yellow in the flashlight's reflection, and the headbanger held the light there and laughed.
    "Everything's different in the dark," he said, then switched off the light and joined us on the log, dogged with us.
    "Well, hiya, fellas. How you fellas doin'?"
    He knew