Through the wilderness out behind their grandmother's old farm home, two kids played. They danced by trees, hands clasping around moss-encrusted branches. They pranced over the flowered prairie, clogs kicking up fountains of mustard-colored pollen. It was a valley they were in, in the sense that all the houses leering over it were nestled atop hills. Their grandmother's house, back when it was their great-grandmother's house was a dairy farm. And since anti-pollution and littering laws were not put into place until well after his death, when her milk bottles would crack or shatter, she would gather the scraps in a pan and fling them from her picture window and towards the wilderness which was of no bother to her. And when storms would push in from the north, the broken glass would be picked up by the waters and carried down the valley, and the shards would lie in wait beneath a thin cake of mud.
Toward the town, which was due west, sat a ran down place which, in such a state, can hardly even be called a shack, but once it was the Barbers. Where dilapidated leather chairs sat, once sat he. He would offer trims and shaves for about an hour's wages from those who toiled in the factories downtown, and for a meal from the farmers out from the country. People would talk of work and more so of their neighbors. They all left with the same haircut - a left-part - and with a clean shave. Since the electric razor wasn't invented until well after the barber's death, he used straight-edges. And since nobody had ever heard of anything like anti-littering legislation at the time, when those straight-edges ever went slightly dull or snapped in two, he would toss them out the side window and toward the wilderness which was of no bother to him. And when rains would rush in from the west, the streams of water which ran down the hill the establishment was perched upon would pick up these razors and rush them down the gully, where the blades would lie in wait under a veneer of fallen leaves.
To the east there was something, and that is all that mattered, because back when the children's great-grandmother was still alive, and when the barber was still alive, there was nothing. Sometime in between, a construction company camped upon what was a naked knoll, and they chopped off its head so the something they were building would have a base to lay on. The pillars of pinewood which stood as walls were once fell on their side, and carried up the point by chains of men drowning in their own sweat. Once the walls were up, those same men would climb atop them and a threadbare wooden webbing, and hammer in shingles on the bias to craft a roof for their something. And although whether or not there were littering laws at the unknown time of construction cannot be proven, the number of crooked nails which have been cast down towards the wilderness and brought further that direction by westward weather, suggests that there weren't, or that the workers simply didn't bother adhering to them. Years later, the stakes would still peak out from the eroded earth.
At the center of this wooded prairie lingered a man. A man which kids hear about whenever they refuse to go to sleep, or are caught taking steps in this wooded prairie. A man more despised than the murderers and the predators which fill Holland's stockades, but this man did not kill, and this man did not play. All he ever did, was steal little girls' and little boys' shoes.
