SKIN

It always began in sunlight.

The long, golden kind that soaked the Kansas fields in late summer. Cicadas droned like old machines. Dust rose behind the bikes as they rattled down the dirt track, a tight pack of boys pedaling hard and reckless, their tires kicking up the heat.

Dan was twelve. Maybe a little younger. It was summer vacation, and everything was wide and flat and full of daring. They shouldn’t have been there. This was private land, and they all knew it. But the hay barn was a magnet, and they’d been before. The farmer hadn’t caught them yet.

They ditched their bikes in the grass and ran, laughing, ducking into the cool gloom of the barn. It smelled of cut grass, old rope, and dry animal droppings. Stacks of hay bales towered like castles. They got to work straight away, shifting, rearranging, carving out tunnels and dens. They shouted and crawled and scratched up their arms. Someone scraped a knee. Someone else sneezed and knocked their head on a beam. It was freedom, rough and breathless.

Later, they lay outside in a circle, backs in the grass, the sky an ocean overhead. The sun pressed down. They talked about nothing. Someone passed around a half-flat can of root beer. The smell of warm hay clung to their clothes. Ladybugs were everywhere, dozens of them, crawling over their arms and faces, landing, lifting off again. Little red sparks with black spots.

Then the oldest boy, Johnno, sat up, picked a ladybug off his t-shirt, and held it gently in the palm of his hand. In the next moment he pulled off one of its wings. He grabbed another and pulled off the back legs. A silent action, but a scream emanated from Dan’s inner core. Why would he do that? Another boy laughed and pulled out a lighter, flicked it once and torched five insects in one blast of his mini-flame thrower.

The others were quiet at first. Watching. Then two of them laughed. One joined in. Then another. A small pile of blackened husks grew in the grass between them.

Dan couldn’t move. He felt alone, completely solitary among the gang of boys.

His body was heavy with it—disgust, shame, something older. He wanted to bring the scream to the surface, or grab the lighter, or run. But he didn’t. He just sat there, sweating in the sun, his heart hammering, while the crackle of small burning bodies filled his ears.

He woke in the dark, soaked in sweat, lungs pulling hard for air, the sound of cicadas still buzzing faintly in his skull.