The following story may be too tame for my regular readers, but I still think it's a pretty good story. It doesn't have a title yet, but I hope you enjoy it as it is anyway...

The park was mostly deserted, save for a few stray eighth graders who liked to smoke near the swings and some pigeons scavenging for scraps of food. For as long as he could remember, Chris always thought of the park as a safe haven, a place you could run to if things weren’t going too well in life. If his parents were fighting, or his sister was fighting with his parents, or if he was about to get into a fight with either his sister or parents, the park provided a place to run off to for a couple hours to let things cool down.

It wasn’t the park that made him feel safe, though. It was the large bundle of woodlands beyond the park. Acres and acres of trees, bushes spread out all over, only a small bare spot set aside as a bike trail. This time of the year, the trees still had a thick growth of leaves all throughout, creating a green canopy that only let a little sunlight through. It was enough to feel like one had complete privacy, but wasn’t completely cut off from the outside world.

Chris laced up his brand new Nike sneakers, the white ones with the Nike logo in bright red on the side. He had begged his mom for a new pair for weeks until finally her resolve collapsed and she had no choice but to get them for the sake of her own sanity. Chris wasn’t a very demanding kid. He did his chores as asked, cleaned his plate after dinner, did his homework before T.V. time, but when it came to his shoes, he was very picky. All his life, the only shoes he would wear were white Nike’s. His father would say that his son was obsessed with shoes with an amusing smile on his face. His father, who had been a faithful customer of penny loafers his entire life, had little room to talk.

Chris ran by the smoking eighth graders. He could never understand the excitement they got from smoking cigarettes, but he was still a fifth grader after all. As far as he was concerned, he had a lot to learn. He tore through the underbrush that separated the woods from the park, and immediately ran to the bike trail. He followed the bike trail for while, breathing naturally, sweating a little under his jacket. The jacket had been a nagging insistence on his mother’s party. She was certain it was going to rain before he got out of school. And sure enough, as soon as he got out of school, not only had it not rained all day, but the temperature had risen to the mid-eighties.

Chris paused for a moment, dropping his book bag to the ground. He quickly yanked off his jacket and tied it around his waist, immediately feeling a lot less warm. He scooped up his backpack and took off running again, bursting with energy that can only be found in excited children.

As he flew through the woods, his mind quickly switched to his baseball cards. Every young man at some point in his life collected them. In his short life, Chris had already amassed a small fortune of them. He had the entire starting team for the Cubs, and with luck he would finish off the Padres and the Angels by the end of the year. Most of the card collectors in his class passed the time by trading their cards, but Chris thought this notion was insane. Why give away what you collected? He knew that most of the boys only traded duplicate cards, but he thought that getting two of the same card was dumb luck. The way he saw it was, if you got so many of the same card, even if it was a lesser player, the value of them grew the more of them you had. In a young mind’s logic, this made perfect sense.

Chris saw a small thorn bush up ahead of him. He readied himself, and when he reached it, he leaped over it in a strident bound. He hit the ground awkwardly and his feet stumbled out from underneath him. He hit the ground rolling, feeling his knees and elbows being scratched up. The one thing he hadn’t counted on was the small hill just beyond the thorn bush. As he tumbled down the hill, he cursed himself for being so stupid. He finally came to a stop at the foot of the hill, sprawling out, staring at the curtain of leaves and branches above. He slowly began to laugh at himself, lying still. He got up slowly, brushes the dirt and leaves off of his clothes, then looked around, soaking in his surroundings.

He decided to take it easy, walking the rest of the way to his special spot. If the woods were a safe-haven, then the small spot next to the fallen, rotting log was his bomb shelter. This is where he had first decided to hide his baseball cards. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust anybody in his house, but to be honest… he didn’t. He knew that his sister would use them to blackmail him in some form or another. In fact, she had already done it once before, threatening to stuff them into the garbage disposal if he didn’t do her chores for a week. Begrudgingly, he did her chores and got the cards back in perfect shape, if not a little bent from her carrying them in her pocket. His parents… Well… They would’ve just thought of it as a waste of time. Parents didn’t seem to understand the importance of having something that was just yours when you were young. They’d been grown up for far too long to appreciate something like that.

He made it to the log, and immediately fell to his knees in front of the spot where he had last buried them. He started digging into the dirt with his fingers, pulling out roots and dead worms and tossing them aside. He had nearly hit the spot when he paused. His instincts weren’t as sharpened as they would be later on in his life. He still had plenty of trial and error before those senses would become refined. But he still had the feeling that he wasn’t alone anymore.

He spun around quickly and found an older gentleman leaning against a tree, lighting a cigarette. Chris jumped to his feet and started to back away from the man. The man nodded at him a little, putting out the lit match in his hand before tossing it to the ground.

“How’s it going?” the man asked politely. Chris didn’t respond. Instead, he kept backing away slowly. His parents had instilled enough fear in him to know that when you’re alone in the woods with a strange man, that’s a bad sign. Thoughts of the baseball cards quickly fell from his mind as he tried to figure out the quickest way out of the woods. Getting no response, the man just shrugged.

“Hot out, isn’t it?”

No response.

“I’m sorry if I scared you.” Chris glanced around nervously, still unsure of where to run, or whether or not somebody would hear him if he screamed. “Don’t freak out. I’m just admiring the woods. I’m not going to hurt you or anything.” Chris didn’t exactly believe this, but something about the man seemed reassuringly familiar. Chris struggled with what to do. As if almost to answer him, the strange man slid down the tree, sitting down in the moist grass below him. Chris relaxed a little, but only a little.

“I used to come out here all of the time,” the man said absently. “To me, there was no safer place than out here.” Chris felt something inside of him stir.

“Me too,” Chris responded quietly. The man looked up at him.

“Excuse me?”

“Me too,” Chris said a little louder. Chris leaned back against the log a little, leaving enough leverage for him to sprint away if the moment demanded so. The man smiled and nodded, taking a drag off of his cigarette.

“I used to hide things out here,” the man said, blowing out smoke. “I figured this was the last place anybody would look for them.” Chris quickly threw a glance to where his baseball cards were buried. Less two feet under the soil was a metal lunch box. Inside of that lunch box was a hundred or so cards wrapped in plastic. Chris looked back at the man.

“Like baseball cards?” Chris asked. The man nodded.

“Amongst other things,” the man said taking another drag from the cigarette. There was something about the man’s eyes that struck Chris as odd. They looked darker than most people’s eyes, sunken in almost, tired. The man looked like he hadn’t slept in days. Chris also noticed a dried spot of blood next to the man’s left nostril. He tried his best not to stare at it.

“So what do you do?” the man asked.

“Do what?” Chris asked puzzled.

“What do you do?”

“I go to school,” Chris answered, not quite understanding the question. The man laughed at this. It wasn’t an evil laugh or anything, in fact it was quite pleasant. As he grew up, Chris would think of the laugh as that of a man who had been lost in the desert for days and had stumbled upon a drinking fountain. Dumbfounded, yet pleased.

“No,” the man said, still chuckling a little. “You said that this was your safe place too. Do you hide anything out here?” At this, Chris tensed up a little. He had become more comfortable around the man, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to share the hiding spot of his most treasured of-

“You don’t have to answer that,” the man responded, cutting off Chris’ thought process. Chris shook his head.

“No,” Chris replied. “I just… I don’t really…”

“You don’t want anybody to know where you hide your private things.”

“Right.”

“And you definitely don’t want to share it with some strange guy you’ve just met in the middle of the woods.”

“Yeah.”

“Because you don’t know whether or not he’d take your baseball cards, right?”

“Exactly!” Chris responded, smiling. He was good. In fact, he was so good that it took him a moment to realize he just told him exactly what he had hidden out there. Chris groaned, sitting down onto the log, not even realizing as he did it. “How did you know?”

“You mentioned them before,” the man said, examining his cigarette. “I just took a wild guess.” The man stabbed out the cigarette in the wet ground and leaned back a little, basking in the sunlight. “How big is your collection?” Chris leaned back a little as well.

“Pretty big,” Chris said with pride. “Close to a hundred, hundred-fifty maybe.” The man nodded.

“That is impressive,” the man said, smiling again. On anybody else, the smile would’ve looked creepy and out of place, but on the man it looked genuine.

“Don’t tell anybody where they are,” Chris asked, sounding a little more whiney than he had wanted.

“Don’t worry about it,” the man said, shaking his head. “I don’t think anybody my age would want to come snooping around from them anyway.” Chris smiled at this. He didn’t know if he could trust this man, but he certainly liked him. The man closed his eyes for a second, and when he opened them, the tired look seemed to dissipate a little.

“So what do you do?” Chris asked. The man shrugged a little.

“I make things,” he responded nonchalantly.

“Like an inventor?” Chris asked, suddenly interested.

“Yeah, like an inventor,” the man agreed.

“What have you invented?” The man thought about this for a moment, then responded:

“Nothing you’ve heard of yet.” They both sat there in silence for a while. Finally, the man stretched out a little, smiling for no reason whatsoever.

“I’d almost forgotten how beautiful it was,” the man said looking around. “Just sitting down and soaking it all in.”

“You don’t get to sit in the woods a lot?” Chris asked, the thought of never sitting in the woods hard to believe. The man smiled and shook his head.

“When you get to my age,” the man said sadly. “You find that you don’t have much time to sit around and appreciate things for how they are. The older you get, the more responsibilities you get, the less time you have. It always feels like you’re running out of time, and by the time you realize how important it is…” The man slowly made a fist, and quickly opened, making a poof sound.

Chris thought about this hard for as long as his mind would allow him to. The man shook his head.

“I didn’t mean to bring a damper on your day,” the man said. He sat up a little and stretched. “You won’t have to worry about any of that for a long time.” Chris smiled and nodded. Chris suddenly realized that he had spent quite a bit of time talking. He looked at his watch and uttered the strongest curse word he knew, which didn’t seem so strong to the older man.

“I’m really sorry, mister,” Chris said getting up, his baseball cards all but forgotten. “I have to get home before my parents worry and send the cops out to look for me.” Chris had a look on his face that clearly showed embarrassment. The man smiled and nods.

“Parents can be paranoid like that sometimes,” the man agreed. “It just means they love you that much more.” Chris smiled, getting off of the log. He started walking towards the gentleman carefully. He held his hand out to him in a polite gesture. The man, surprised, reached out and shook the young man’s hand. Chris smiled.

“It was really nice meeting you,” Chris said, taking off.

“It was nice meeting you too, Chris,” the man said watching after him. It wouldn’t be until he reached home that Chris realized that he had never told the man his name.

Back at the secret spot, the man slowly got to his feet. Age had taken most of his agility with it, old childhood injuries such as busted knees rendered weak in certain areas. Slowly, he walked over to the spot where Chris had been digging earlier. The hole he had made wasn’t very deep at all, and it didn’t take much for the man to scrape dirt over it, covering the spot again. Chris’ secret would be safe for a while at least, until the rain came next year and flooded the entire forest. The man looked at the spot sadly, thinking of how heartbroken Chris would be when he would come back the day after that, and find them gone. But it was only the first in a set of many heartbreaks in his life. The man counted on that.

The man bent down to the ground again, groaning almost as loudly as his knees creaked. He began to lace his tattered, dirty white Nike sneakers. He stood up slowly and took one last look around. He took one last glance at where Chris had run off to. The man smiled a little as he knew that Chris would be living out the rest of a day he’d soon forget, but would also miss forever.