[NF] White cedar
My brother asked if I wanted to play a game.
He explained the game's rules, which I didn’t understand, and I can only really remember the fact that he was explaining it.
As we walked through our backyard, he continued to tell me about the game.
It could have been spring or it could have been fall, but it was a nice day outside.
The lawn was clearly untended for some time, some seasons worth of branches and leaves, the grass was never left to overgrow but weeds lived through their seasons undisturbed. The wild strawberries probably taste better without a dusting of glyphosate. It was definitely springtime.
He continued explaining the game and what it was all about. Something about “zombies”. I don’t think he considered explaining “zombies” nor do I think I asked for an explanation, but they sounded kinda cool.
He stopped at the base of a northern white cedar, it could be because of its soft, papery bark or its lack of low hanging limbs. Maybe he didn’t think about his selection all that much, but it was the right tree for this kind of thing. He unpocketed some sort of thumb tack, maybe a pin, and stuck it into the trunk, hammering it in once with a closed fist to affix it.
He explained that this was the “mystery box” and that this mystery box was to give out a random weapon when you pressed the “button”.
It blew me away that such a thing was possible, given that he had only pounded a tack into a tree. It continues to blow my mind. We would often walk around the woods finding a host of ligneous pistols, rifles, shotguns, bazookas, but what came from the mystery box was a mystery. I pressed the mystery box’s button so many times as we played that I would have certainly gotten a ray-gun if I had known what that was. Other than the mystery box, it was pretty much just a game of tag as far as I can remember. I think the zombie would return to some designated point, or maybe they’d just get far enough away after having been “killed” before beginning to chase again.
We eventually stopped playing, on his timing of course. I could have continued forever, I still hadn’t gotten everything I wanted from the mystery box. I guess it probably takes a lot of imaginative effort to play two player tag with a six year old, especially as a teenager who wishes he was playing CoD Zombies.
I went back to the spot where the mystery box was pretty often, checking the bark for the pin. When it wasn’t where I was expecting it to be, I’d check around the trunk making sure I hadn’t misremembered its position. When it wasn't anywhere in the bark, I would sift through leaves near the base of the tree hoping that it had fallen off and been covered.
I never ended up finding the mystery box next to that cedar again.
I mean you probably can't play tag alone anyway.