Hide and Seek, and: Androczi's Wine

Hide and Seek

It was the summer beforeUncle Bradley crashed his carin the locust tree, the time of nightwhen children long to be seen.Cigarettes embered in the yard likelightning bugs, and the last warm swallowsof beer sloshed in bottoms of cans.My aunts and uncles had allabandoned the game while I waited,concealed in the shortest maplewhere I'd fled, feet flappingthe dewey grass. Then, behind leaveswith veins like back of my hand,I heard a rustling and Brad's facerose to me, fringed by his jangly blonde curls.Twenty-three, the family's youngestsave me, he grinned into the kingdomwhere my spine pressed to bark and my armsrested on limbs as a throne. I acceptedhis generous terms, the honorof being found, and passed throughhis warm hands to the ground.

Androczi's Wine

He decanted a capful of goldhoney mead in the beveled sherry glassmother reached from top shelves.I remember it sparkled like his eyesunder an Alpine fedora. I can seehis creased cheeks. He'd been my agewhen he fled the boys' Hungarian work campand hid under a chicken coop's floor boards,his heartbeat defying their pecks. Finally,the State busted him here, at our county fair,

cops dumping the sample-sized plasticcups off his card table when a bandof middle school boys got buzzed.They'd snickered and downed his finestdandelion wine, that musk he craftedfrom West Virginia weeds. What remained,between quilter and apple butter vendor:only a barn's dirt floor, a space wheresomething delicious he'd share with allthe world for free had been seized.