Kids smelling of afternoon sweat and school

tramp over a bridge, thinking of shoving each other into the stream below,

thinking of x-box and snacks and spring break dreams,

but down below in the dank dark cavern,

sits an alien to the day, a void devoid of light,

thinking of night, discarded snacks and broken dreams,

and how to lure careless prey tramping overhead like a herd of goats

waking up a troll.

One kid smacks another with a sound like static shock,

and with a fateful fall and cold splash, the kid and the troll

see one another, a different world in each pair of eyes.

Too shocked to breathe, and with a scream and a scramble, the kid is free,

forgetting spring break dreams, games and snacks and scraped up knees,

but runs and runs outrunning his pack, but the smack that sent him over the edge of

a bright bright world to face a void so dark in a pair of eyes lurking under a bridge

and smelling of old man sweat and strange things, has broken a piece of innocence like glass,

and a warning shard sticks in his eye telling him forever to look under the bridge one last time.

Author’s Note:

Before the word “troll” meant someone sitting anonymously behind a computer giving other people on the internet a hard time, it referred to either a being of Scandinavian folklore, or it meant someone of ill intent lurking around somewhere. Kids now have cell phones to report lurking trolls, but that wasn’t always the case. I remember my sister and I walking to school one morning and just as we were about to go under an underpass, we saw up ahead in the dim corridor, a shadow of a man quickly duck out and back out of view. My sister and I looked at each other and ran back home. It was a brief but scary experience, and we never took that underpass to school again. Kids navigate and dodge several scary predatory encounters on their way to adulthood. Each encounter leaves a mark on our memories, as if to say “remember this if you want to live”.

Photo by Jacob Colvi

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