The Bobtail Game By Peter Emmett Naughton
I never had a traumatic childhood. This seems to be something unique for most people my age. Almost everyone I know is in therapy and even those that aren’t talk as though they’re perpetually speaking to an analyst. They go on and on about the things that happened to them when they were young and how it’s affected them as adults; every bad job, failed romance and unfulfilled wish is attributed to parental neglect or domineering control that robbed them of their adolescence and, according to them, permanently stunted their potential. Personally I’ve never had much trouble taking responsibility for my shortcomings, and I’ve got more than a few. It just seems easier than trying to pinpoint some past event that caused everything to go wrong. When I think back to being a kid, all I remember is how much simpler life was. People took care of you and told you where to go and what to do. Even then I think I appreciated how comforting that was. Nowadays I feel like I’m fumbling around in the dark half the time and hoping that no one notices. It seems strange, but I think I understood my place in the world more clearly back then. I had things figured out in a way that completely eludes me now. The only thing I never managed to unravel was Elsa. I still think about her most days, especially when the leaves start to change. We first met one fall afternoon on the playground when she was ten and I was eleven. I was hanging upside down on the jungle-gym, day dreaming about a monster movie featuring killer slugs that was going to be on TV that evening and looking forward to taco night at my house; -how anyone can hate a time in their life when there was something called ‘taco night’ every week continues to baffle meI was letting the blood rush to my head and dreaming of tortillas when a group of girls ambled up a few feet in front of me. They were ragging on their folks for not letting them date until high school and moaning about unfair curfews and the myriad parental cruelties and injustices they had all endured. The levels of suffering became more and more epic with each subsequent story and by the end you’d swear that these poor creatures had been shackled in a high tower with only the sun and the moon to keep them company as they waited for someone to rescue them, all except for Elsa. She just stood there not saying anything, only nodding and occasionally looking