Mom put up a fence around the lettuce and I couldn't open the latch.
But she never got mad at me about it. She did make sure I had some lettuce to play with every day. One leaf at a time I was allowed to shred lettuce while Mom giggled madly like she could feel my exuberance. When we play in the garden, digging holes or shredding succulent lettuce, I forget about the thing under the shed.
But the thing under the shed didn't forget about us. The days grew shorter and colder, and dark came earlier and lifted later. The mornings were frosty, and the grass crunched crisply underfoot. Then the snow came. Fluffy little fluffs of cold fluffiness. It would swirl delightfully from out of the heavy clouds.
Mom taught Caleb and me to catch the flakes on our tongues. They melted almost immediately. We spent more than one afternoon jumping up at the wet bits trying to catch them in our mouths. Our garden was covered in mounds of white. Except for the dead spot.
All through that winter, it was diligently enlarging its influence over the surface. For the most part, it had seemed to stagnate. That appearance was an illusion caused by the fact that the snow, which would not stay frozen over it, hid its advance under a puddle. I still avoided the insect graveyard even the air seemed to skirt around. But it was getting bigger, stretching under the ramp leading up to the shed. The water's surface was an inky massacre of dead bug bits edging closer to the mound around the rabbits' burrow.
As spring brought warmer days, Mom, Caleb, and I would grill on the back porch. Okay. Caleb grilled. Mom carried stuff out to him. I sat on the edge of the picnic table and tasted the little bits of meat and cheese and my big brother fed me as we waited for the burgers to be done. Caleb and Mom helped me eat my burgers so that I didn't make a mess. After dinner I got to dig in the garden, the loam squishing delightfully through my little fingers. Then Mom would wash my hands and give me lettuce to savor and gnaw on.
My life was perfect. Almost perfect enough to ignore the thing under the shed. The whispers continued, sometimes louder than others. They never stopped, only undulated with their serpentine essence.
The spring brought an additional fun thing. Baby bunnies. I couldn't see them, of course. At least, not at first. I could hear them making little baby bunny rabbit sounds as they snuffled and romped in their subterranean home. So…Maybe…I might have gotten a little too excited about the baby bunnies when they first ventured outside. They. Were. So. Fuzzy.
I wanted to play with them and as soon as the black puddle had receded from around their burrow, they were coming outside to play at night. When they did, I would paw at the sliding glass door to the backyard, staring wistfully over the porch at the small puffy kittens bouncing carefully around the garden. Did you know that baby rabbits are also called kittens just like baby cats?
My big brother told me that as we stood together watching little poufs nibbling their way around the garden we worked so hard to grow. Mom wouldn't let us try to catch them because she didn't want us playing outside at night. She also said it would be rude to interrupt their dinner. During the day, Caleb and I would place vegetables at the entrance to their home and wait, breathlessly, at what we thought was a non-threatening distance, hoping to catch a closer look at their adorable little snugglums. Snugglums that were very close to the thing under the shed.