I had gotten one of the remote control flying helicopters for Christmas that year and was intent on trying it out. I had been at the age where flight was magical; helicopters and airplanes were great soaring beasts that some Engineer (the title was always capitalized to me) had imbued magic into. They carried us across the sky, and set us down safely. And little tiny helicopters and airplanes were made for small children so they, too, could experience the magic of flight.
The helicopter was rickety, the plastic frame easily bent, and so even as I tried to steer it back on course, it flew straight over the fence and into Mr. Oldric's yard.
Mr. Oldric was the old man of the neighborhood. My parents brought over a casserole every Tuesday night, and I watched every week from my bedroom as a grizzled, shadowy figure took the casserole from his house and disappeared into its depths again. No child really saw Mr. Oldric; he was the subject of many rumors, one being that he had only one eye (the other, it was said, had been lost in hand-to-hand combat in Vietnam). He was a demon who could not stand being seen by children; he was a creature that our parents had to pay deference to in order to keep him from eating the entire town; he was...well, he was everything that children create in their minds to scare the living daylights out of other children.
Mr. Oldric had a privacy fence around his entire backyard, and nobody had seen through it – though it wasn't as though we hadn't tried. But our parents had warned us not to infringe on Mr. Oldric's privacy, and to let him be.
But this was my helicopter, Mr. Oldric was probably doing whatever he did during the daytime and not looking out the windows, and my six-year-old head thought it would be a good idea to simply climb over Mr. Oldric's fence, grab my helicopter, and get out. Not only would I have my helicopter again, but I would have bragging rights – I, of all the children in the neighborhood, had seen Mr. Oldric's backyard.
I leaped and grabbed the top of the fence with my hands. The narrow tips dug into my palms, and I scrabbled for a few seconds on the boards before finally pushing myself to the top with a burst of strength.
I stopped at the top of the fence and stared.
Our backyard was grassy. I had been over to several friends' houses, and their backyards were mostly like mine. Some had gardens, or decks, or patios, or decorative statues.
Consuming the entirety of Mr. Oldric's backyard was a hole. It was deep, much too deep for me to see down, and the walls were smooth dirt. It seemed to go on forever, and to my six-year-old brain, it probably did. My helicopter was nowhere in sight.
Suddenly I heard a clacking sound and nearly fell off the fence in fright. I stared at the hole of Mr. Oldric's backyard, and tried to see what was making the noise. Slowly, a form began to emerge from the darkness. It was a little girl.
She was like no other girl I had seen, or most likely ever will see. Her face was pale, her hair blonde and ragged, and her eyes were a cerulean color that did not belong in this world. She used one hand to clasp imperceptible handholds in the dirt walls of that pit, and every time she grabbed on, the clacking noise would echo down the pit.
In her other hand was my helicopter. She stared at me for a long moment, and I stared back at her. It was the first time I saw a girl and didn't think that she was yucky. Maybe it was because of her eyes, how the whites blended in with the pallidness of her skin, and the blue stood out at me, the only splotch of color on this otherwise monochrome being. Maybe it was because she was only a girl in name - there was something about her that was alien, something not quite there. Whatever the reason, I didn't want to scream about cooties when I saw her holding my helicopter. I just stared at her, and she stared back.
Then she threw the helicopter at me.
I had dropped the remote control when the helicopter had gone over the fence. But even as she turned upside-down and clacked away down the pit, the rotors began to turn, and in one elegant movement, the helicopter curved, flying away from the pit that was Mr. Oldric's backyard, and back to our own yard.
I dropped from the fence – on our side – and grabbed the helicopter and just stared at it. The little plastic landing skids on the bottom were bent and mangled, as though the flying machine had landed on them from a great height.
When I told my parents about my adventure, they got angry.
"What have we told you about going into other people's property without permission?” they asked me.
“But there was a pit!” I told them. They were missing the important things, as usual. “In his backyard!”
They told me that it was ridiculous. How could Mr. Oldric dig a pit? He was pushing ninety, after all.
I wouldn't budge. There had been a pit, and a girl, and everyone knew it meant the beginnings of an adventure. When my parents saw the pit - and they would, there was no doubt about it - they would realize I was right, and we would go down the hole, and explore the strange world from where the strange pale girl had come from.
My father eventually took me outside and put me on his shoulders so I could see over the fence into Mr. Oldric's backyard. There was green grass and a little decorative fountain.
There was no sign of the pit, or the little girl who had clambered from its depths to give me my helicopter.
I insisted that there had been a pit, however, in private. I didn't tell anyone else, at first indignant that my parents didn't believe me. Then, when I became a teenager, and started getting interested in being cool, I was embarrassed that I had once believed that an old toy helicopter had fallen down a deep pit in Mr. Oldric's backyard.
After several years, I had become a mildly successful adult. I had bought my own house, about twenty miles from where I had grown up. My parents had been contemplating moving for a few years, and they asked me to come over to the old house so they could give me some boxes of old toys that they'd saved. They'd kept them, as mementos of times long past, but now they were just more things to move from house to house. I was, after all, and adult, and had produced more impressive, and useful, mementos to keep in the house.
I dug through the boxes, staring at the old toys, trying to remember playing with them as a child. I tried to remember what it felt like to be six again, when flying was magic and Engineers was capitalized and there was a great pit in Mr. Oldric's backyard.
And when I found the old toy helicopter, I stared at the bent and twisted landing skids for a long moment before packing the toy away again.
After all, the time always comes to put away childish things.
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