The Authentic Eclectic

Tigress of the Shrubland (1)

We agreed that Janice would become the most tigress of the lot of us. “Most tigress,” that was Beagle’s term, age six.

Mr. Leonard never bought us modern toys. The playroom included a ragdoll, a jack-in-the-box, and a wooden train. Nothing moved or glowed.

Public Domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auguste_Renoir,_Versailles,_1900%E2%80%931905.jpg

Funny thing — you give a kid a ball, and they’ll find hours of entertainment. We went out in the yard on a fine spring day. Somehow, I still remember the sequence when it happened: I threw the ball to Tim, who threw it to Chelsea, who threw it back to me. I missed. The ball disappeared into the shrubbery, so I got down on hands and knees to find it.

Dark masses crowded the moon, bleating and churning, and my breath sounded like the curious softly resounding silence of a canyon. I crawled through a tunnel that pressed like a cottony womb and expanded into a viscous pool through which I swam without need of breath until the spiny ball of a sweetgum that turned out to be a hard, knobby spider caught hold of my wrist with a silken bracelet and led me out into the courtyard.

We did not have a courtyard, and it was midday, yet I now stood in a courtyard illuminated by moonlight. I was not afraid. I had read The Chronicles of Narnia, Treasure Island, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, Five Children and It, The…